The U.S. Physician Payments Sunshine Act is changing the ways medical meeting planners, sponsors and attendees approach events.
Pre-Sunshine Act tracking and reporting was straightforward. All event sponsors—or anyone else—cared about was the total spend. Sponsors still need the aggregate spend, but the Sunshine Act also requires sponsors to report any “payment or other transfer of value” to health care professionals. The broad definition appears to encompass anything from payments for services rendered such as speaking fees to giveaways at medical congresses and educational seminars.
“We are over-gathering information just to be sure we catch everything that is ultimately required,” says Kimberly St. Martin, CMP, a meeting planner for Biomet Spine. “We are entering the medical license number for every attendee and every activity. If we have drinks and dinner, for example, we are dividing the cost among attendees. If a group comes in from the airport, we apportion the cost. Planners are the key to gathering all the data and getting the reporting done.”
There are only two ways to gather the masses of data required by the Sunshine Act, says George Odom, vice president of Integrated Travel and Meetings for Advito, the consulting arm of BCD Travel and BCD Meetings & Incentives. “You’ve got to use technology or throw huge numbers of people at it. And adding more people to your event staff is not an option in today’s climate.”
The problem, Odom says, is the lack of products designed to track Sunshine Act spending. Event management suites from Cvent, Active Network and other vendors capture meeting-related data, but the applications are not specific to Sunshine Act requirements.
“You need all that traditional data and more for federal reporting,” he says. “Technology can be used as a data aggregator. When there are limits to what a meeting sponsor can and cannot pay for, technology can act as a monitor. The challenge is for the technology providers to understand exactly what meeting planners need, to capture data in a format that is useful, and have a system that enables a meeting planner to mine the data. Meeting planners are having to become more tech-savvy. But of even more importance, they have to be able to understand where that data resides and what the data is telling them. There is not yet one single tool that does all you need to meet the Sunshine requirements.”
