Compliance & workflow market broadens
Jinfo Blog

6th May 2010

By Joanna Ptolomey

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Highly regulated industries such as pharmaceutical, financial, insurance and healthcare have always required systems to help manage the integration of regulatory requirements and manage complex compliance and audit procedures. In 2010 the LiveWire and FreePint have been abuzz with news and trends in workflow and compliance issues market. Some further LiveWire posts to check out include 'Changing culture' (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27859), 'Managing info chaos' (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27856), and 'Workflow - issues of integration' (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27852). A recent FUMSI Folio also provides commentary and some further reading around some of the key issues of accountability and governance (http://web.freepint.com/go/shop/report/1565). Recently two of the big guns, LexisNexis and Qumas, have joined products to create an integrated regulatory and business intelligence technology with a compliance management function - The LexisNexis Compliance Manager. This solution delivers access to legal and regulatory content from LexisNexis directly with the Qumas compliance management system. Qumas provides the compliance platform via a lifecycle management tool for all document types and lifecycle stages. It consolidates documentation within an organisation such as intranets, spreadsheets, documents systems and email. Therefore making the audit track easier to manage for retrieval and traceability of information for approvals and reporting procedures. LexisNexis provides the content, including but not limited to, statues and regulations, bill and regulatory tracking, legal case law and guidelines, and US and municipal codes. The search interface includes a general search page for commonly used sources that the customer can customize with favourites. The interface also includes task-based pages providing access to commonly used content such as regulations. There are also pre-configured searches to help those less familiar with legal researching. The Compliance Manager helps customers identify new regulations by searching or by receiving alerts. Qumas have historically offered clients compliance solutions for dynamic and complex industries for managing their governance, processes, workflow and risk. This has included a strong foothold within the life sciences industry. With the partnership of LexisNexis it takes this platform into a broader industry application. In time this partnership has possibilities for a new range of applications for specific industry sectors. Workflow and compliance have always been incredibly hot topics in highly regulated industries such as pharmaceutical and in general in the STM sector. In a forthcoming product review for VIP we look at biomedexperts.com which is another workflow product that has a broader customer base than the name suggests. The LexisNexis Qumas marriage is a good example of the growing trend for bolting on compliance technology/systems to give a broader customer base. To round this topic off another FUMSI Folio will focus on the issues of 'Workflow integration'. It is to be published soon and we are in the process of gathering some feedback. You can check it out here http://www.fumsi.com/go/f978, and we would really like to know your opinions and insights. Joanna Ptolomey is a contributing for the FUMSI 'Use' practice area (http://www.fumsi.com/use/) and a contributing editor for the VIP LiveWire (http://web.vivavip.com/forum/LiveWire/); she also reviews products for VIP. (http://www.vivavip.com/)

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