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Boost Your Business with Compliance Monitoring
Ash Aggarwal, Principal, Commercial Compliance Consulting, IQVIA
Apr 16, 2024

Compliance monitoring isn’t just a regulatory requirement, it’s also a strategic advantage for your business. It helps you identify and mitigate risks, improve efficiency, and foster a culture of ethics and accountability. Monitoring isn’t simply a retrospective look back at the level of compliance across a sample of activities, transactions, or events. It’s a mechanism by which an organization can demonstrate they have an effective compliance program and the compliance functions value lever, contributing to continuous improvement. Here are some of the benefits of compliance monitoring and how to make it meaningful to your business.

What is compliance monitoring?

Compliance monitoring is the process of ensuring that your business follows the laws, regulations, standards, and policies that apply to your industry and operations. It involves regular and frequent checks of your performance, processes, and transactions against your compliance policies and procedures.

Compliance monitoring is different from compliance auditing, which is a periodic and retrospective review of your compliance records and evidence. While auditing is reactive, monitoring is proactive. It allows you to adjust your operations in real time and prevent violations before they occur.

The importance of compliance monitoring

Compliance monitoring is important for several reasons:

  • It protects your business from legal and financial consequences. By avoiding violations, you can save your business from fines, penalties, lawsuits, and reputational damage.
  • It builds trust with your stakeholders. By demonstrating your commitment to compliance, you can enhance your reputation and credibility with your customers, partners, investors, and regulators.
  • It creates a positive culture. By promoting a culture of accountability, responsibility, and ethical behavior, you can improve your employee engagement, morale, and retention.
  • It identifies compliance risks early. By detecting potential issues and gaps, you can take corrective actions and implement improvement plans before they escalate into problems.
  • It measures and evaluates your compliance program success. By tracking and reporting your compliance activities and outcomes, you can assess the effectiveness of your compliance policies and procedures and identify opportunities for technical and behavioral change.

Make it meaningful to your business

To make compliance monitoring meaningful to your business, you need to:

  • Develop a compliance monitoring plan. A compliance monitoring plan is a document that outlines the scope, frequency, methods, and responsibilities of your compliance monitoring activities. It should be aligned with your compliance policy and risk assessment and updated regularly to reflect any changes in your business or regulatory environment.
  • Implement a compliance monitoring system. A compliance monitoring system is a tool that helps you automate, streamline, and simplify your compliance monitoring activities. It should be able to collect, store, analyze, and report your compliance data and evidence, and alert you of any anomalies or issues. A compliance monitoring system can also help you create audit-ready reports and dashboards that show your compliance performance and status.
  • Engage your employees and stakeholders. A compliance monitoring program is only as good as the people who execute it. You need to ensure that your employees and stakeholders are aware of, understand, and support your compliance monitoring objectives and activities. You can do this by providing regular training, communication, and feedback, and by involving them in the design and implementation of your compliance monitoring plan and system.
  • Deliver insight to leaders. We’ve already described that monitoring is aimed to be proactive, yet many programs get stuck on reporting exceptions and issues as the end of the monitoring cycle, Trends and behaviors sliced by geography or business unit can provide valuable information to business stakeholders to inform not only changes to processes, systems and controls, but also strategies. Data, technology and analytics are key building blocks in insight generation and AI can unlock more predictive capabilities.

Optimize and evolve your monitoring program

IQVIA’s Commercial Compliance consulting team offers end to end capabilities that are flexible and right sized to increase effectiveness and maturity.

Our embedded monitoring and compliance experts serve as an extension of your team, providing you with the best practices and insights to ensure quality and compliance. We can adapt the monitoring plan based on the outputs, changes to the business and the regulatory landscape, and conduct live and transactional monitoring across promotional and medical activities. Our field-based labor model reduces pass-through costs for live monitoring, and our mix of on- and off-shore resources allows us to reduce the costs of monitoring without compromising on quality.

Contact us today to learn more about our monitoring approach and how we can help you achieve compliance excellence.
Our approach to optimizing compliance monitoring programs

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