To meet federal regulatory requirements, a growing medical device manufacturer needed to streamline the data collection, sales interaction process and overall relationship management with healthcare professionals to meet compliance needs. The company identified that the manual overhead to track sales team’s events, maintain proper documentation of events, and track the effectiveness of the compliance team’s corrective actions was inefficient and challenging.

To both alleviate the administrative burden on staff employees and stay competitive in the medical device market, the manufacturer needed a solution to:

• Help reduce manual effort and response time to address infractions
• Automate communication where possible
• Centralize and consolidate disparate systems to a single application
• Create a database to archive documentation and corrective actions
• Produce dashboard visualizations to track infraction metrics and task prioritization

Dashboards act as an X-ray into data concerns

The manufacturer connected with their trusted advisor, Baker Tilly, to identify and address risk within their sales organization using robust dashboard visualizations of expense transactions, doctor visits and other metrics. As the client continued to use these dashboards, it became clear that they required a solution capable of not only identifying risk but one that enabled action by documenting the corrective steps taken by the compliance department to satisfy their regulators and reduce business risk. To address this, the advisory team leveraged Tableau extensions and Anvil X to bring their entire workflow under one roof.

Anvil X is an advanced toolkit for building and deploying Tableau extensions entirely in Python. The Anvil platform allowed the team to rapidly develop an application in Python and integrate it within the client’s existing systems. Right from that visualization, users were now able to capture all the activity and archive relevant documentation of follow-ups directly in their Snowflake data warehouse, allowing them to meet their compliance needs effectively and efficiently.

Anvil X moves the needle

With a lightweight solution stack, the advisory team could quickly iterate through designs and collect feedback from end-users. They were able to quickly address feature requests and highlight new KPIs not identified in the original project scope.

Some of the key enhancements to the manufacturer’s dashboards and process included:

1. Chat functionality, allowing dashboard users to communicate with each other right in the context of the transaction under discussion
2. Management of attributes of infractions and ability to ‘clear’ infractions in certain cases
3. Direct integration of the Tableau dashboard to the application to allow for writeback to the source data
4. Efficient capturing of meetings, emails, trainings, or other corrective actions engaged in with the sales individuals.

All of this was easily deployed through coding in Python and integrated through Anvil X.

Using data to make business decisions

The manufacturer is now armed with clear documentation of the steps taken to resolve infractions and stay in compliance with new federal regulation. By enabling the client to see an infraction in real time and note the steps taken to address it directly in the dashboard, they have essentially integrated data analytics into their business processes and decision-making, creating efficiencies for staff, enabling a focus on the key risks, and facilitating stronger data quality and management.

We help our clients make better decisions using data. Connect with the Baker Tilly team or learn more about Anvil X.