Tag: Pharmacovigilance

Postmarket Surveillance: Leveraging Outsourcing

Posted on by Brandon Miller

Companies within the life sciences industry have been increasing their use of third parties to manage postmarket surveillance activities in recent years. If you are thinking about outsourcing some of your company’s more time-consuming tasks, it’s important to keep in mind that there are both advantages and disadvantages to this method.

 

Interested in Outsourcing your Postmarket Surveillance activities? Contact RCA Now →

 

Below, we will discuss some of the pros and cons of outsourcing so that you have the knowledge to make the right choice for your business.

 

Pros

 

  • Reduced costs: Outsourcing your post market surveillance activities will improve upon your overall business functions, thereby reducing operating costs and increasing profits. You can use those savings to foster growth for your company.
  • Leveraging resources: While cost is one of the main benefits to outsourcing quality assurance, the advantages offer so much more. For example, you can use the time and effort you save on post market surveillance to leverage your talent and resources on other high-value tasks. By delegating less complex work to a team of compliance experts, you can make the most of your valuable employees with riskier responsibilities.
  • Taking advantage of core competencies: What are your team members’ strengths in relation to your customers’ needs? This question will weigh heavily in your decision to outsource, especially if your internal resources lack the qualifications necessary to handle regulatory affairs. Outsourcing allows you to focus on your own core competencies while using a third party’s core competencies to increase productivity.
  • Improved speed and efficiency: If a task falls outside your core competency, it will take longer to complete it, with a greater risk for error. However, outsourcing to an expert speeds up your processes and helps create a more efficient work process for all parties involved.

 

Cons

 

  • Less direct control: When you outsource business processes, you release direct control you might otherwise have over those processes. It’s important to keep this in mind if you know that a mistake or failure of a task could have serious implications on the business.
  • Pressure on supplier management control: Outsourcing places pressure on your supplier management controls, which could result in losses for your company if poorly handled. As a result, you will need to establish a co-governance plan that allows you to retain some control.
  • Quality of the process: Potential negative impact on quality of the process outcome or services and its impact on profitability and customer satisfaction.

 

To begin the Regulatory Compliance Associates scoping process today, please enter your information in the blue form below and click the submit button at the bottom of the webpage. 

 

Crisis Management Playbook

Posted on by Brandon Miller

crisis management playbookDeveloping a crisis management playbook designed for the challenges of the pharmaceutical industry sector is vital to ensuring long term business continuity. Below are a few critical risk management elements you should consider for your team during crisis handling & developing a crisis management playbook.

 

Risk Management

 

Being able to identify factors that impacted product safety or regulatory compliance is one of the most important elements during the risk assessment phase. During RCA’s risk management services process, operational risk management is one of the first remediation steps to consider.

 

Identify Risk

 

Being able to identify the product hazards that caused the crisis is critical to understand scenario planning. Conduct due diligence to ensure that your product design outputs include no risks that are unnecessary to the consumer. Hazards that do include one or more risk factors must be analyzed why the patient benefit exceeds the financial risk.

 

Measure Risk

 

During scenario planning, identify the critical elements to measure your team and results by via a risk management framework. A risk profile for each product in question can support evaluating, reporting and monitoring adverse events. Systemic risk should be analyzed for product risk profiles with longer term, reoccurring events or specific pharmacovigilance indicators identified as proactive crisis control.

 

Mitigate Risk

 

Being able to work clearly and concisely with your regulatory agency is critical for the due diligence solutions presented for review. Examining all hazards that have been identified during the risk mitigation phase is essential to success during the risk management process. Consider any of the threats that are regarded as acceptable with known risks and document unusual activity in your risk management plan.

 

Crisis Management Communications

 

An initial step recommended by RCA’s medical device consulting team is to identify and evaluate the regulatory compliance dangers and situations. For example, assessing the vulnerability of medical device cybersecurity must consider internal and external threat modeling. Any type of cyber breach that might impact your operations team, business reputation, or stakeholder relationships should have a detailed communication strategy.

 

Crisis Communication Plans

 

A veteran RCA medical device consultant suggests developing a universal shared space where team members can bookmark & access the crisis comms document. A communication strategy would then be shared with communication partners engaged in the public relations and crisis management campaign.

 

Risk Management Communications

 

Inside a successful crisis communication team, everyone knows their role and responsibilities. RCA’s regulatory consulting Experts often designate a process leader who clearly understands the team stakeholders and functions they represent. Refine your approval process so that messaging not only meets external approved communications from these stakeholders, but also legal concerns.

 

Crisis Control

 

A detailed risk management communication plan helps specify different examples for sharing risk messaging to either internal audiences or external stakeholders. Design your communication plan templates so that information is easy to understand for multiple audiences. Different types of tactics to be considered for templates (e.g. press release, social media) to confirm the messaging reliability of the crisis communication strategy.

 

 

To begin the Regulatory Compliance Associates scoping process today, please enter your information in the blue form below and click the submit button at the bottom of the webpage. You may also email us at [email protected].