Deloitte Launches D.Spot: A Digital Compliance Management Tool for Healthcare Conferences

Recently, nine ministries and commissions, including the National Health Commission, the Ministry of Public Security, the State Administration of Taxation, and the National Healthcare Security Administration, jointly issued the “Notice on Printing and Distributing the Key Points for Rectifying Unhealthy Practices in the Pharmaceutical Procurement and Sales Sector and Medical Services in 2019.” A key focus of the notice is the stringent crackdown on commercial bribery and the rigorous investigation of illegal activities such as disguised academic conferences. On May 23 this year, the Ministry of Finance issued an “urgent” document to the finance departments (bureaus) of all provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities, as well as their affiliated institutions, launching special inspections of the accounting information quality of 77 pharmaceutical companies. These inspections focused on verifying the authenticity of cost and expense records and identifying any instances of fictitious entries. In particular, a “penetrating” regulatory approach was applied to scrutinize the authenticity of sales expenses, specifically examining whether medical institutions had shifted costs such as conference fees, office expenses, and equipment purchase costs onto pharmaceutical companies.

In actual business operations, organizing and conducting academic conferences serves as a critical and highly meaningful avenue for academic promotion for pharmaceutical and medical device companies. However, non-compliant or even illegal practices often occur, such as using falsified invoices to embezzle conference funds for commercial bribery or fraud. Such non-compliant or unlawful activities may, in minor cases, increase the financial burden on enterprises and hinder their business development; in severe cases, they can damage corporate reputation and cause significant losses. Therefore, the compliance and effectiveness of such conferences are key areas of concern for pharmaceutical and medical device companies.

Traditional compliance checks for medical conferences often adopt a sampling approach, whereby companies select a subset of meetings from thousands and delegate third-party personnel or internal compliance staff to conduct on-site inspections to verify the authenticity, validity, and compliance of these events. However, this method is constrained by costs and has a limited scope, failing to cover all medical conferences. In particular, for many conferences held in remote areas, manual spot checks are not only time-consuming but also labor- and resource-intensive, thereby increasing the burden on enterprises.

D.Spot is an intelligent digital tool for remote event management, jointly developed by Deloitte’s Life Sciences & Health Care practice and Deloitte’s Innovation, Digital & Data Center (IDDC). By embedding intelligent algorithms, integrating information-based processes, and establishing an automated analytics framework, it enables enterprises to efficiently manage various medical conferences remotely.

Feng Xiaomin, Manager of Risk Advisory at Deloitte China and Product Manager of D.Spot

“D.Spot was originally designed to help enterprises further enhance the efficiency of compliance management for medical conferences.” Feng Xiaomin, Risk Advisory Manager at Deloitte China and Product Manager of D.Spot, told VCBeat that D.Spot operates via an iOS app, enabling compliance monitoring for a single conference to be conducted remotely by just two staff members.

First, conference organizers log in to the app or use the mini-program to perform designated actions or capture specified content, such as taking photos of speakers, providing QR codes for check-in, and capturing images of the conference venue. This integrates and streamlines the previously cumbersome process of conference data collection. Meanwhile, all operations within the app or mini-program are transmitted to the backend in real time, enabling real-time monitoring of information.

Subsequently, third-party hired professionals or personnel from the corporate compliance management department conducted remote observations via the D.Spot backend to collect and maintain information. “Conventional meeting information collection is fragmented and unstructured, whereas the D.Spot tool enables centralized, structured, real-time data collection,” said Feng Xiaomin.

Upon completion of the meeting, D.Spot can automatically generate graphical reports to assist Deloitte’s Project Management Office (PMO) team or corporate compliance personnel in analyzing and interpreting data to assess meeting compliance. Furthermore, D.Spot can assign risk scores based on the authenticity, validity, and compliance of the meeting, and provide recommendations for meeting monitoring plans tailored to these risk scores. For instance, organizers of meetings with higher risk scores may be required to increase online video observation time or provide additional meeting documentation; whereas for meetings with lower risk scores, compliance monitoring procedures can be appropriately streamlined to enhance management efficiency. Additionally, leveraging the extensive volume of collected meeting data, D.Spot can help enterprises analyze and extract insights from multiple dimensions, thereby improving the overall effectiveness of compliance operations.

“Custom analysis based on real-time data has significantly improved timeliness and accuracy,” said Feng Xiaomin. Traditional meeting management, from post-meeting information collection to structured analysis and feedback, can take weeks or even a month. The D.Spot tool simplifies this process by enabling direct information collection, integration, and processing during the meeting itself. It leverages built-in intelligent algorithms for real-time analysis, allowing meeting organizers and corporate meeting compliance managers to perform customized queries, statistics, and analyses within their authorized access levels, thereby enhancing work efficiency and management quality.

D.Spot breaks through the geographical limitations of traditional manual spot checks, enabling meeting management to remain unaffected by objective factors such as long distances, adverse weather conditions, and last-minute schedule changes. By leveraging remote connectivity for virtual oversight, it significantly reduces on-site management costs, including travel and labor expenses associated with physical inspections.

As a remote conference management tool, D.Spot follows the lifecycle of medical conferences, covering the entire meeting process from pre-conference planning and in-conference execution to post-conference review.

D.Spot enables online activity scheduling and real-time monitoring.

During the pre-meeting phase, the D.Spot risk profiling scoring system is leveraged to effectively identify high-risk meetings and selectively target them as monitoring samples. Furthermore, through an early warning alert system, potential high-risk meetings are flagged in advance, thereby shifting compliance and risk management interventions from post-event review to real-time or pre-event stages.

D.Spot features facial recognition to effectively ensure the authenticity of meetings.

During the execution phase of the conference, D.Spot matches the organizer’s location information with the planned venue. It assesses the authenticity of the conference from dimensions such as time, location, and speaker information by leveraging methods including facial recognition, on-site photos, short videos, real-time video streams, and uploaded attachment documents.

During the post-meeting feedback phase, the D.Spot risk profiling and early warning system leverages internal and external data to provide a comprehensive, multi-dimensional monitoring framework with visualized dynamic displays of overall meeting risk management status. Additionally, D.Spot enables users to submit online feedback on remote spot-check results for meetings, facilitating direct and effective communication between frontline meeting organizers and compliance departments, thereby reducing information asymmetry. Ultimately, this helps enterprises continuously enhance their meeting compliance management capabilities.

Certainly, D.Spot also provides corresponding digital solutions for data analysis. The D.Spot data analysis framework primarily consists of four key components: Executive Summary, Variance Analysis, Risk Profiling, and Customizable Export of Intelligent Reports.

Overall, against the backdrop of stringent regulatory oversight, how to leverage limited resources to efficiently enhance compliance management for meetings is a common challenge faced by every enterprise. Deloitte’s D.Spot digital solution aims to deliver true value to enterprises by managing the entire lifecycle of meetings, thereby improving the compliance and effectiveness of medical conferences.