President-Elect Kathy Grau had the privilege of moderating two keynote panel discussions at the 8th Annual Pharmaceutical and Medical Meetings Summit in Boston on March 10 - 12. One of the panel discussions was "Regulatory Updates: Examine Current Trends within a nd Outside the US" Kathy wanted to share some things with MPI New Jersey that was discussed during this session.

The first thing discussed was the collaboration between MPI and IPCAA (International Pharmaceutical Congress Advisory Association).  An update on how the US and Europe are working together was provided. On January 31st, IPCAA and representatives of the MPI-MD Advisory Board met for a planning session to prepare for an impactful and relevant US update on an International Compliance Event.  This event is to be held in the U.S., likely in Q3/Q4, 2020 and is designed to provide a high-level overview of the differences between U.S. and European congresses and the latest changes in compliance regulations worldwide.

 

The panel talked about the changes with EFPIA (European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations). EFPIA represents the pharmaceutical industry operating in Europe, through its direct membership of 36 national associations and 39 leading pharmaceutical companies. EFPIA's mission is to create a collaborative environment that enables it's members to innovate, discover, develop and deliver new therapies and vaccines for people across Europe, as well as contribute to the European economy and better outcomes for patients. If you are interacting with HCPs from Europe, it's important to know and understand their code. The code can be found here.    Chapter 2 highlights interactions with HCPs, HCOs AND PO. Article 10.05 addresses the monetary threshold of each country for meals.

There was a lot of discussion around GDPR and CCPA. Data privacy is a hot topic and also very important to us as individuals and our attendees. Most of the panel said that their internal data privacy, compliance, and/or legal department handled changes to ensure they were GDPR compliance. The panel discussed that most internal departments aren't aware of exactly what the meetings & events team does including the type of data we collect, and how we use and share that data. When asked, most people said they aren't encrypting reports (rooming, VIP, travel manifests, etc.) before sending via email either internally or externally. The importance of encrypting any document that has PII (personally identifiable information) was discussed as was the importance of getting consent from attendees to share information. This should be added to registration sites.

 

The consensus was that there is still a lot to be done around data privacy as well as understanding meal caps outside the US. We all agreed that it was important to partner with your internal stakeholders including but not limited to meeting requestors, compliance, regulatory, data privacy, legal.