The Life Sciences consulting industry has always been subject to frequent and seismic changes. With the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, and the slowness for new regulations and guidelines to be made clear, manufacturers and service providers are struggling to position themselves ahead of the curve. To help clients cope, Cumberland Consulting has brought on Amy VanDeCar as a senior principal to the practice. She brings to the table more than a dozen years of industry experience and will help lead the firm's government programs practice as it braces for the new realities coming down the pike.
Consulting: What are some of the biggest challenges Life Sciences clients are facing?
VanDeCar: Companies are really seeking to make sure they have the appropriate systems in place and that they're using them effectively to be able to look at large volumes of data so they ultimately can respond to changing market conditions. With my focus on government programs, a lot of the conversation is around change. We had healthcare reform legislation passed four years ago and we are still waiting for rules to come out to give manufacturers some guidance on what's expected of them under these changed rules that have now been in effect for years. From a systems perspective, a lot of companies are really concerned about timing, and companies looking at implementations or significant upgrades are trying to look into a crystal ball and predict when we might get the regulation so they can incorporate that into their project plans. It's difficult. So as companies are trying to go about their daily business, if they're looking at system upgrades or implementations, it adds a layer of complexity.
Consulting: Is it your sense that companies are accepting that the ACA is here to stay, or are they still holding their breath for repeal?
VanDeCar: I think the provisions that have the largest financial impact on manufacturers are here to stay, I think that's the general sense in industry. The nuances in how the actual healthcare portion of it continues to roll out, certainly there's a lot of speculation that that could change or potentially go away entirely, the provisions in the legislation that manufacturers have already had to deal with really are financial. They're paying more now in Medicaid rebates, they're paying more in Medicare rebates that didn't exist prior to 2011, so I think the sense in industry is there's no incentive for the government to repeal provisions that have drug companies paying more money than they had before.
Consulting: What are some of the goals for the growth of the practice?
VanDeCar: Cumberland in general and the Life Science practice were founded as very much a technology consulting firm. One of the things Cumberland Life Sciences has done is to really strive to have a balance between the technology shop and to have the business experience. We still have tremendous depth of technology experience, and that is the core of the company, but I'm not a technology consultant, per se. I've done professional services for a software vendor, I've been on more of the compliance and regulatory side, and now coming back into this world, the intent is not to turn me into a technical implementer. It's to leverage the business knowledge I have to make sure we're offering a balanced approach so we can help companies with their requirements development, help them understand what they need to do when we do eventually get rules.
Consulting: What are some of the big consulting opportunities arising from all this change and "hurry up and wait"?
VanDeCar: The hurry up and wait part is hard for everyone, consultants in particular. Change in general is a wonderful thing for consulting firms. In Life Sciences we tend to call the Affordable Care Act the "Full Consultant Employment Act", because it's so large, it's so complicated. A lot of companies have benefitted from it, I think from the software implementation side it becomes a planning challenge, from the predictability, making sure you have the appropriate staff levels, it's hard to have exactly the right number of resources. You're always going to have a few too many or not quite enough, but not knowing when you're going to get a rule and having these dates published, it makes it really hard to predict and have the appropriate budgeting and staffing in place.
Consulting: Once the coming changes are finally made clear, what's the plan of attack to help companies adjust and adapt?
VanDeCar: I think the first thing is to dive in immediately and make sure we understand the regulation. They typically release these things at about 4:15 on a Friday afternoon, preferably on a holiday weekend. What has to happen as a consulting firm in this space is you just have to dive in immediately. When the proposed rule came out, I was at a different firm, but before the weekend was out I had read the entire 200+ pages. We were blogging on it, and really seeking to get our arms around it so we could advise clients to the best of our ability. That's going to be absolutely the case when we get the final rule. Cumberland has been proactive in talking to industry lawyers; we've taken steps to establish a relationship with one of the leading attorneys in this case. We know this rule is coming, we're going to do analysis but we also want to have conversations with her to make sure we're not going off on a tangent or advising clients in a way that we shouldn't be.
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