3 key ways to improve the medical grantmaking process

When it comes to medical affairs grantmaking, time is of the essence. By reducing manual workflows and approval process timelines, life sciences organizations can accelerate product delivery and treatment access, allowing them to provide more support to patients in need. 

At the same time, because medical grantmaking programs are governed by global regulations, they require careful oversight and strict compliance. Therefore, it’s essential to balance speed against oversight.

Medical grantmaking processes—which involve multiple types of grants, multinational borders and business units, regulatory differences, and siloed sources of information—have evolved ad hoc and are largely manual. If you’re looking to minimize inconsistencies, errors, and non-compliance in your grantmaking programs, consider adopting an efficient and reliable solution to assist your efforts.

Bonterra Research Grants (formerly CyberGrants) has partnered with leading life sciences organizations to build a technology platform with embedded compliance and streamlined workflows to accelerate funding, improve efficiency, and provide visibility across the full suite of funding programs. Let’s discuss three game-changing ways this solution can simplify and improve your medical grantmaking.

1. Create a single source of truth 

When your life sciences organization manually tracks medical affairs programs in multiple systems, it's difficult to gain a holistic view of your impact and understand where your dollars are going. Using grant management technology can prevent the need to hop from one system to another, reducing errors and data inconsistencies.

With Bonterra Research Grants, you can house all of your programs in one location, making program management easier and compliance a no-brainer. Our solution supports and enables a variety of medical affairs programming, such as:

• Independent Medical Education
• Expanded Access Programs
• Charitable Contributions
• Investigator-Initiated Research, Studies, and Trials
• Patient Advocacy
• Fellowships and Sponsorships

Having the ability to manage your programs within a single software solution will bring unprecedented flexibility, visibility, and improved risk control across all your medical grantmaking.

2. Overcome your biggest medical grantmaking obstacles

When moving from a manual medical grantmaking process to one that is efficient, streamlined, and reliable, it’s important to identify your primary obstacles and opportunities for improvement. Let’s explore three common obstacles we often see our customers face and how Bonterra Research Grants can alleviate those pain points.

Complex approval workflows

Especially for Expanded Access Programs, building approval workflows and their associated steps can be a complex process. Each workflow and the specific users involved may vary based on a range of criteria like country, disease, therapeutic area, product, and dollar amount. 

Solution: Workflow automation

With Bonterra’s solution, you can define the baseline approval workflow for your program, along with the associated review and approval criteria. With that information, our software will do all the thinking for you while also allowing you the flexibility to override if necessary. The engine defines the steps and the people or roles involved, enforces permissions, and executes the rules required for each step in the process.

Privacy and compliance

Maintaining privacy and compliance regulations from country to country can be an intensive and involved task. When new regulatory requirements arise, it can be difficult to adapt quickly as they’re rolled out in different countries. 

Solution: Tailored processing and automated alerts

Bonterra facilitates advanced privacy and compliance management by allowing clients to tailor their information handling and approval processing based on regions and their respective regulations. This can be particularly helpful for international companies. 

Additionally, users can integrate the platform directly with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other internal watchlists as well as build any compliance or Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) alerts directly into the platform. 

Duplicate data 

When there are multiple users entering data into various systems, the chances of manual error and duplicate data increase. Since accuracy is crucial to ensure the effectiveness of your medical grantmaking, it’s necessary to lower the possibility of duplicate data as much as possible.

Solution: System consolidation

Bonterra Research Grants allows you to integrate your platform with every system that interacts with your medical affairs programs. This platform will serve as the hub—or single source of truth—for your entire medical grantmaking process, which will push and pull data to and from your various systems.

3. Embrace unmatched medical grantmaking capabilities

At Bonterra, we partner with leading life sciences organizations to understand best practices and continually integrate emerging industry trends into our solutions. As a result, we offer capabilities that are uniquely positioned to support your medical affairs grants programming. Some of our essential product features and capabilities include:

• Insights. Our robust analytics solution can help your organization maintain regulatory compliance, aggregate data across multiple programs, identify bottlenecks in workflows and approval processes, and more. 
• Dynamic Approval Routing. With User Tagging, you can tag individuals with specific attributes associated with approval criteria. This means that requests for approval will automatically route to users who meet a predefined set of criteria.
• Workflow Status. From submission all the way to impact reporting, you can easily identify the status of a grant request through every step of its lifecycle.
• Worksheets. This feature offers a new way to capture and store multi-dimensional data in a tabular format. By seamlessly embedding data tables in your grant requests or impact reports, you can display your data in logical tables and rows for easy analysis.
• DocuSign Integration. Through Bonterra’s platform, users can integrate their system with DocuSign to sign and execute agreements while complying with industry and region-specific laws and standards for electronic signatures and ID verification.

Furthermore, you’ll have access to an experienced team of experts who can provide significant insights into industry trends and best practices to ensure that your grant programs and grantmaking processes remain optimized for years to come.

Take control of all your medical affairs grants

90% of the top 10 life sciences companies already leverage Bonterra’s solution to master the complexities associated with medical grants management and boost their impact. By improving and streamlining your organization’s medical grantmaking process, you’ll not only save countless hours but make a greater difference in furthering your purpose.