The Managed Care Division of a top global pharmaceutical company was having difficulty facilitating the sharing of information across the various internal functions involved in supporting the managed care business. These separate functions included Account Management, Sales Management, Global Brand Management, Contracts/Procurement, Competitive Intelligence, and Managed Care Specialists. No central repository existed and information sharing was done exclusively through telephone calls and e-mails.
The new President of the Managed Care Division was shocked at the lack of software tools and infrastructure in place to support decision making and asked the Director of the Managed Care Intelligence group to address the problem. The scope of the proposed project was quite large and involved understanding and documenting the complex decisions that were made within the Division, cataloging knowledge sources, mapping the processes and knowledge flows, and developing a performance management system. The Director wanted to engage a consulting firm with strong knowledge management capabilities and deep industry experience in pharmaceuticals and managed care. She selected Iknow for the assignment.
Iknow designed the new knowledge management processes, identified sources of information and tracked how they were used, and created a performance scorecard.
The project involved three work streams. The Process work stream documented current state business processes and knowledge flows and identified key performances measures. Over fifty interviews led to understanding specific managed-care related tasks and activities, the decisions they make related to managed care, sources and uses of data, and “future state” business requirements.
The Content work stream focused on content identification and acquisition. A Content Source Analysis was conducted to identify the types and sources of information used by each of the groups. A database was created that cataloged all of the managed care content.
The Scorecard and Technology Architecture work stream focused on creating a measurement tool that provided visibility over major account status and to the performance of his internal operations. Iknow developed a performance management framework and defined the performance metrics. The technology architecture documented the company’s technical standards and identified the data sources required for the scorecard application.
The Division implemented many of Iknow’s recommendations. It achieved more effective contract negotiations, better monitoring of contract performance, improved quality of the business intelligence produced, faster and higher quality development of custom value-added managed care programs, and integrated managed care and product launch plans.