Pharma Leader Becomes a
Superhero in Compliance & Integrity

Introduction

Compliance is crucial for pharmaceutical organizations because they are highly regulated by laws and regulations that significantly impact how drugs are brought to market and how they are tested for contamination, effectiveness, and safety. Failure to comply with these regulations can result in significant fines, legal action, and reputational damage for the company. Learning compliance information can be challenging because it can be lengthy, complicated, and uninteresting.

One of the world’s leading biopharmaceutical companies was planning to launch its newly redesigned field guide, a long-standing policy outlining healthcare laws and requirements that every sales rep must know. To supplement this new guide, the company sought an innovative way to reinforce the importance of ethical decision-making, compliance, and integrity to over 1300 field sales reps and leaders in their internal medicine and vaccine divisions.

The organization knew compliance content is often tedious, complex, and lengthy, but it is also mission-critical, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. Without it, employees could put patients, themselves, and their customers in jeopardy. Because of this, the big pharma company sought a partner that could develop a more engaging way to teach their sales reps about compliance and integrity that would also be accessible on demand and improve retention of the material.

Challenges

The first challenge was convincing the client that compliance could be fun and engaging. For objectives to be met, PDG had to take everyday issues and notoriously long, dull enterprise-wide compliance topics and make them entertaining, streamlined, and organized.

The next challenge was to come up with creative ideas for how to develop this new, engaging content. The content had to be available to the field reps outside the company’s LMS so it could be easily consumed at the time of need without taking the sales team out of the field to attend training.

The content also needed to be visually engaging; divided into short, easy-to-understand sections; interactive; culturally sensitive; available in several languages; and accessible to individuals with differing abilities.

Solution

To start, PDG conducted a”Think Session”— a freewheeling brainstorming meeting where no idea is a bad idea. The goal of the Think Session was to figure out how to take mundane content and make it engaging, interesting, and even exciting.

Among the many ideas generated in the Think Session was to develop a creative graphic novel with characters, a villain, and challenges. PDG titled it “The Integrity League—How to Be a Compliance Superhero.” This concept originally referred to the sales reps executing in the field but morphed into a team of compliance-minded superheroes, each modeled after one of the key compliance requirements:

• Alignment – compliant internal collaboration
• Dr. Wisdom – effective provider of education
• Clarity – consistent use of approved messaging

PDG also created a character to lead The Integrity League called Captain Compliance—and made the character look suspiciously like the head of compliance. She loved the idea of making compliance eye-catching and fun and was delighted by her superhero avatar.

Much sensitivity was applied to the characters’ ethnicity and age, and PDG paid particular attention to cultural appropriateness. And, since sitting through hours of compliance learning is rarely at the top of anybody’s priority list, PDG made sure the episodes were brief (3-5 minutes). They also indexed the material so field reps could easily find any topic when needed as a refresher.

As part of the engagement, PDG incorporated an AI-driven adaptive learning platform that utilized a system of tiered knowledge questions to determine comprehension of key concepts. Through this system, PDG could establish a baseline (what the learner knew coming in) and identify the knowledge uplift (the increase in comprehension) after consuming the Integrity League episodes.

Results

With an innovative and customized approach, this pharma organization can now communicate and reinforce mission-critical policies, ethics, and compliance requirements in a way that enables employees to access, learn, and retain concepts easily.

The program also improves the sales reps’ productivity by enabling them to access content without being taken out of the field to attend mandatory compliance training. Because this material can be viewed from anywhere, the sales teams can learn while they travel, during lunch, or at other idle times, and have on-demand access to important information at the time of need.

Early leading indicators are strong, including:

• 95% of the audience has consumed the content
• Knowledge scores have improved for every topic deployed

Anecdotal feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive, noting it is “fun,” “engaging,” and “not what we expect from compliance.”

The program has also been very well-received by the compliance team, stating, “The storylines really help capture participants’ attention and make learning about compliance very fun and engaging. This learning content is valuable because it can be leveraged throughout the company.”

Future Use

While the content was designed specifically for the Field sales reps, plans are underway to adapt the design and concept in new ways for other business units and global locations.