Life Sciences organizations operate in one of the world’s most highly regulated industries. Whether managing investigator meetings, advisory boards, or patient programs, each and every aspect of travel and event management must strike the perfect balance between compliance and attendee experience.
Unlike many other industries, Life Sciences meetings will often involve complex stakeholder groups and healthcare professionals along with strict regulatory requirements. As a result of this, successful programs require specialist expertise and carefully designed processes paired with technology that is able to support both compliance and exceptional service delivery.
Understanding the Complexity of Life Sciences Meetings
It’s no secret that BCD is a world leader in managing Life Sciences travel programs, but there are lessons to be learned from this unique vertical that apply to everyone. Listening is vital and working together to understand needs is paramount. Using the combined power of BCD’s technology makes the journey seamless for travelers with specific needs.
Life Sciences is a pretty big tent, actually, and it includes the things that probably spring immediately to mind, like pharmaceutical manufacturers. These are the people that are making insulin pumps, insulin monitoring devices, pacemakers, etc., but it also includes a whole other ecosystem – Those are consumer healthcare companies that make, for example, toothpaste and ibuprofen, as well as insurers, hospitals and group purchasing organizations, which are made up of conglomerate of health care professionals (HCPs) who are trying to leverage their buying power. So lots of different types of organizations and companies in the big tent of Life Sciences.
What they all have in common is they’re all operating in a highly regulated environment. Our Life Sciences Center of Excellence is an answer to that. We create bespoke solutions that are really designed and custom-built to address the needs of those types of unique clients, often delivered through tailored strategic meeting management programs.
Supporting Patients and Healthcare Professionals
The patient piece of this is really going one level deeper, focusing on a particular type of customer, of our customers – which are the patients. These are sometimes folks who are medically fragile. They’re folks that have caregivers that also need support. They are people who have unique travel needs as attendees when they’re coming to meetings. Both on the travel and meeting side, we take special care of those people, and that has required the development of special and unique service sets that address those particular types of needs.
Why Specialist Event Management Matters in Life Sciences
Life Sciences meetings present challenges that extend much further than more traditional corporate events. Organizers must be able to coordinate diverse attendee groups while at the same time, operating within strict regulatory frameworks that can very often vary between countries, and governing bodies. Each and every stage of the event, from travel arrangements through to reporting and compliance documentation, requires extremely careful planning paired with specialist oversight.
Most meetings will involve healthcare professionals and patients, along with external partners, all with different needs and expectations. Delivering an attendee experience that feels smooth while maintaining compliance takes established processes and event management solutions that are specifically designed for the Life Sciences sector.
BCD’s Specialist Approach to Life Sciences
Right now, we’re probably handling about 90 percent of the top 20 pharma companies in the world. And when you start to bring in things like diagnostics and biotech and medical devices, we are truly leading the charge in this space. We’ve invested in it, which is exciting because what we’re doing and what we invest into will go beyond even the Life Sciences space.
We have a lot of experience in the travel and meeting sector and in some of the investments like our HCPP (Healthcare Professionals and Patient desk), we’re actually specialized in that service. It’s an area that I think many companies have struggled to be able to bring forward.
