A More Strategic Approach to Medical Meetings

Progress without centralization
While the traditional idea of an SMMP often entails some amount of centralization in meetings management, the case of Millennium Pharmaceuticals -- in which a subsidiary operates a strategic meetings program with some degree of autonomy -- is fairly typical in the health-care industry, according to Cvent's Palmeri. "Most of our health-care clients are decentralized in terms of their meeting-planning function," observes Palmeri. "There might be a small core of shared services that provide some meetings-related support and may be responsible for writing policies and such, but the actual planning operation is happening throughout the company in different pockets."

That's due to a number of factors, says Palmeri, including the prevalence of mergers and acquisitions, the geographic dispersion of many global companies and the diversity of product lines within many health-care firms, where the various divisions might have wildly differing business processes and goals. "They realize that standardizing all of their meeting processes in these kinds of organizations is probably not realistic," she notes.

Instead, Palmeri finds that the best practice that has emerged across many companies in these fields is to look for consistencies among divisions, rather than imposing them, and use the technology to standardize those consistencies. "So if they always have to get some kind of fiduciary approval for a meeting, and if that's the same in any part of the organization, then they're looking to use the technology to standardize and streamline that -- even if after that point they have to branch off into other processes," Palmeri says. The important thing, she adds, is that they capture information and streamline, to whatever degree possible, interactions with health-care professionals and, to a lesser extent, the meetings-approval process.

They then roll that out in a phased, gradual approach. "They're seeing benefits and they're getting wins from this approach, whereas if they waited to try to do something more holistic and all-encompassing, they wouldn't have a success story to tell," says Palmeri. "It's a way to be able to start building momentum, getting traction on a program that we know takes years."

Global expansion
Despite the inherent challenges, notes Steve O'Malley, many companies are now looking "to find ways to enjoy the savings and risk mitigations that they're now getting here in North America, where SMMP is a well-developed practice, and extend that overseas to the other largest markets they serve."

Lisa Palmeri likewise has noted the global push. "This is much more prevalent than it was three to five years ago," she says. And an even more recent trend: "We're actually seeing companies based outside of the U.S. rolling out SMMPs and then expanding them to North America. That's a switch from what we've seen historically; but we're seeing a growing familiarity with SMMP in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in Latin America. It's still emerging, but it's a trend that more and more markets are embracing."