The Benefits of Automating your Conflicts of Interest Program

Conflicts of Interest or COI can be viewed as a naturally occurring offshoot in the world of business. Companies cannot escape conflicts of interest. They can, however, find a way to resolve the conflicts as they appear. But what happens when organizations are faced with the challenge to resolve conflicts at scale?

This is where automation comes in.

Automation is the ultimate gift when it comes to managing your conflicts of interest program with ease. It allows organizations to achieve more in less time alongside reducing costs and boosting the quality of results. Here’s a quick look at the benefits it offers:

• Improves the efficiency of processes
• Reduces costs
• Widens the flow of information and accessibility
• Keeps all the data secured
• Erases any room for implicit bias or human errors
• Runs efficient risk-based management that is backed by information technology and data analytics
• Offers efficient data and information governance

The right type of automation for COI programs not only helps build a solid foundation for your incident management process, but it also has the capacity for consistent scalability. Read on to understand how automation can be a powerful tool for your conflicts of interest program.

Ease of Use

A conflict of interest program is fully efficient only when it drives 100% participation. The question here is not whether or not your organization has conflicts of interest. Instead, it is about how effectively your team is able to spot and erase those conflicts.

Sure, your highly dedicated compliance team can stitch together consistent and thorough processes. But when the time comes to sort out these conflicts at scale, it becomes impossible to achieve the right results without automation.

Technology simplifies all your submission and review processes. This makes it easy for everyone to access, and navigate processes, ultimately boosting the rate of resolution.

Faster Processes and Higher Accuracy in Reporting

Let’s face it: trying to run a COI process without appropriate documentation and communications around it is just like running a train with no tracks. Regulators and auditors can question you about your conflict of interest processes at any time. This is because they require evidence that proves the effectiveness of your compliance program. They would also want full disclosure of a process’s lifecycle management.

Automating your conflicts of interest program ensures you not only keep a solid source of truth but also present it instantly when the time comes. What’s more, preserving the literature around these processes is critical for future insights. Because automation offers faster reporting, you can always spot risks before they hit your company’s shore so your team can take appropriate steps to mitigate them.

Handling conflicts of interest processes manually exposes them to human error which could later translate into a disaster for the business. Resolving conflicts also demands a neutral and truthful judgment and unlike humans, technology rarely takes any sides. In other words, automating your COI programs leaves no room for implicit biases.

The Ability to Scale Faster

Scalability is another vital factor to grab 100% participation in your COI efforts. Automating your COI program can help accommodate the needs of your fast-growing business with ease.

When you deploy an efficient workflow automation system, you can quickly carry out countless other compliance and risk management processes. In other words, automation helps promote further scalability across your company and its departments.

The result? Every department in your organization ends up maintaining the highest standards of compliance with COI policies.

Simplifies and Streamlines Review Processes

Automation brings several tools to manage your COI program. These tools not only make it effortless to run processes at scale but they also help manage every process right from documentation to resolution. For instance, Ethico’s smart-routing technology sends approvals to teams that need to see them and automatically keeps track of the participation it receives.

Through automation, your teams can manage all the requests and approvals with ease and within a simple and intuitive interface. This not only helps you manage risks better but also saves you tons of time and money.

Smooth Tracking

Your policies and procedures have an important role to play in managing your conflict of interest processes. But only following them is not enough. When you handle COI processes at scale, it is critical to log and track them. A smart COI automation keeps track of all issues consistently and sees them through to their resolutions.

Through intuitive and easy-to-use workflow design tools, your teams can have authorized access to fully disclosed tracked, and logged processes at any time.

Valuable Analysis and Insight 

Sure, running auditing and reporting processes is important to document the efficiency of your COI processes. What most companies don’t realize, however, is that the data captured through auditing and reporting offers value that is not just limited to regulatory processes.

Automation unlocks efficient analysis features and reporting dashboards that help glean several benefits. These include spotting high-risk behaviors, problem employees, and other valuable insights.

For instance, Ethico’s automated COI system helps make it effortless to manage your disclosure process from distribution to resolution. It also helps distribute questionnaires for response and annual surveys with ease by:

• Automating tagging of records that correspond to questionnaire responses that were negative
• Automating disclosure routing based on manager to promote the strictest level of accountability
• Documenting resolutions that are directly linked to each respondent
• Organizing and preserving responses from former questionnaires to run any comparisons
• Collecting insights to avoid any potential risks down the line

Automate Conflict of Interest Program

A great conflict of interest system has the potential to drive 100% participation by streamlining your submission and review procedures. Because this technology automates mitigation measures, the rate of resolution of conflicts shoots up.

Through an automated COI system, you can amass valuable insights. These insights can then help improve the growth of your business by spotting improvement areas within the departments. The combination of an intuitive interface and endless automation tools within a conflict of interest software ultimately helps organizations mitigate risks and enhance operations.