3 key ways to streamline the medical affairs grantmaking process

When it comes to medical affairs, time is of the essence, and optimizing the grantmaking process is vital. Manual workflows and lengthy approval steps can hinder the timely delivery of products and treatments to patients. These programs are also governed by global regulations and require strict compliance. As a result, speed must be carefully balanced against oversight. 

Many life sciences companies still rely on spreadsheets and emails for managing their medical affairs grant programs. This manual approach across various grants, countries, and business units can lead to data inconsistencies, errors, and non-compliance. Leading organizations are turning to tailored medical grants software to meet specific program requirements and evolving needs. 

Bonterra CyberGrants for Life Sciences offers over 20 years of expertise working with life sciences companies of all sizes to build a platform with embedded compliance and streamlined workflows. We’re here to help you accelerate funding, improve efficiency, and provide comprehensive visibility across your full suite of funding programs. Let’s explore three transformative ways CyberGrants can streamline and elevate your grantmaking lifecycle. 

Create a single source of truth 

When your medical grants programs are tracked in multiple systems, it’s difficult to gain a holistic view of your impact and understand where your dollars are going. A unified medical affairs grants management platform simplifies processes by eliminating the need to navigate disparate systems, reducing errors and inconsistencies. 

With CyberGrants, all activities are centralized, easing program management and ensuring compliance. Our software supports a variety of medical affairs grant programming, including: 

• Independent medical education 
• Expanded access programs 
• Charitable contributions 
• Investigator-initiated research, studies, and trials 
• Patient advocacy 
• Fellowships and sponsorships 

Whether you’re supporting expanded access or patient advocacy grants, managing programs within a single platform enhances flexibility, visibility, and risk control. Learn more about our medical affairs platform. 

Overcome your biggest grantmaking obstacles 

When moving from a manual medical grantmaking process to one that is efficient, streamlined, and automated, it’s important to identify your primary obstacles and opportunities for improvement. Here are four common challenges our customers face and how CyberGrants addresses them: 

Complex approval workflows 

For expanded access, building intricate approval workflows is often necessary. You need to accommodate new product launches; changes in stakeholder approvals; and other fields such as country, disease, therapeutic area, or dollar amount. 

Solution: Workflow automation and flexible data model 

With CyberGrants you can define the baseline approval workflow for your program, along with the associated review and approval criteria.  Our software automates processes, allowing flexibility to override when needed. The engine defines the steps and the people or roles involved, enforces permissions, and executes the rules required for each step in the process. 

Dependence on vendor change orders  

Relying on vendors for simple updates and customizations can cause delays, miscommunication, and added costs. This slows workflows and limits agility, making it harder to adapt to changing needs. 

Solution: Unlimited self-service configurability 

CyberGrants puts the control in your hands with an intuitive self-service interface. Your technical administrators can easily publish production code changes, avoiding vendor delays and inefficiencies. Customers perform hundreds — or even thousands — of updates annually, ensuring processes stay efficient and aligned with goals. 

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 

CyberGrants allows for advanced privacy management, letting customers tailor information handling based on region-specific regulations. Plus, our solution has compliance and SOP alerts built directly into the platform, so you’ll be alerted if anything is off track. 

Duplicate data 

When there are multiple users entering data into various systems, you run the risk of manual error and duplicate data. Since accuracy is paramount for your medical affairs grant programs, it’s necessary to lower the possibility of duplicate data as much as possible. 

Solution: System consolidation 

CyberGrants integrates with systems interacting with your programs, serving as a central hub — your single source of truth for the entire review and approval process. 

Embrace unmatched medical affairs grantmaking capabilities 

Partnering with leading life sciences organizations, we integrate industry best practices and trends into our solutions. CyberGrants offers capabilities uniquely suited to support your medical affairs grantmaking processes: 

• Insights: Robust analytics help maintain regulatory compliance, aggregate data across multiple programs, identify workflow and approval process bottlenecks, and more. 

• Dynamic approval routing: Auto-route requests based on predefined criteria with user tagging functionality. 

• Workflow status: Easily identify the status of a grant request through every step of its lifecycle, from submission to impact reporting. 

• Worksheets: Capture and store multi-dimensional data seamlessly in tabular format. By seamlessly embedding tables in your grant requests or impact reports, you can display your data in logical columns and rows for easy analysis. 

• eSignature integration: Users can integrate their system with eSignature providers (like DocuSign) to sign and execute agreements while complying with industry and region-specific laws and standards for electronic signatures and identity verification. 

Your trusted partner in streamlined medical affairs grantmaking 

CyberGrants for Life Sciences empowers medical affairs teams to save time and work smarter with automation and self-service features. Our platform streamlines grant management by eliminating manual processes and offering tools to make your team more agile and efficient.  

Want to learn how to transform your grantmaking process? Download our guide, “From bottlenecks to breakthroughs,” and discover how CyberGrants can help your team increase efficiency to achieve greater impact.