As part of our commitment to providing the most robust out-of-the-box (OOTB) offering to our safety customers, we recently asked Bristol Myers Squibb and Boehringer-Ingelheim and—one of our newest platform customers and one of our most seasoned—for insight sharing on how they’re using LifeSphere Safety, and what we could improve for further standardization across best practices.
Unique Perspectives from Industry Leaders
When Bristol Myers Squibb acquired Celgene, they faced a daunting data challenge: integrating two large pharmaceutical companies and blending diverse patient safety approaches. ArisGlobal’s LifeSphere® Safety suite was the answer, as it was a familiar solution to Celgene and would support the newly unified team while also improving overall efficiency, automation, and flexibility across the safety organization.
Beyond those benefits, LifeSphere Safety was built to provide standardization across a multi-tenant, out-of-the-box (OOTB) solution. This meant that as Bristol Myers Squibb grew, they would be able to share best practices with their industry peers on the multi-tenant solution, and seamlessly collaborate and scale internally with a flatter learning curves.
Boehringer-Ingelheim, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, knew the challenges of creating a patient-centric safety system—and has been solving these challenges with ArisGlobal solutions for more than a decade. Both sets of industry leaders bring unique perspectives about what the future holds for a next generation pharmacovigilance OOTB solution.
From Out-of-the-Box to Evolving the Box
In enlisting Bristol Myers Squibb and Boehringer-Ingelheim, ArisGlobal had one goal: to ensure that LifeSphere’s multi-tenant platform provides best-in-class OOTB usability for the widest variety of users. Looking at everything from data privacy to distribution attributes to report templates, we hope to ensure next-level standardization by creating best practices based on creating efficiency, flexibility, and more streamlined processes.
“The group’s mindset was great for standardization,” said Swetha Kannan, ArisGlobal Vice President of Business Transformation. “Bristol Myers Squibb and Boehringer-Ingelheim brought a keen desire to support other ArisGlobal customers in the OOTB framework, share best practices, and provide guidance. As ArisGlobal strives to build strong partnerships with our customers beyond implementation, these meaningful discussions about usability from active users of the system gave us a huge opportunity to consolidate concrete feedback and meaningful insights.”
Outcomes of Looking Beyond the Box: Standardization Takeaways
ArisGlobal was able to look at how Bristol Myers Squibb and Boehringer-Ingelheim used our solutions and compare the gains and gaps in their custom configurations in order optimize a shared OOTB structure. For example, we were able to analyze how 16 distribution attributes and 17 custom reports created during implementation (for one or both customers) have now been standardized to the LifeSphere OOTB package. ArisGlobal worked with Bristol Myers Squibb and Boehringer-Ingelheim on both high-level best practices and granular details, discussing more than 400 configuration items, 8 configuration categories, and 40 reports.
“Bristol Myers Squibb was so excited to align on the LifeSphere configurations and custom reports solutions,” said Jennifer Manochio, Senior Director of Global Safety Systems at Bristol Myers Squibb. “This initiative was a huge step toward realizing our ultimate vision for standardization by increasing the out-of-the-box offerings that support all tenant companies. And what an amazing opportunity to benchmark so intimately with another company on so many system and process-related topics! We look forward to continued collaboration with our fellow ArisGlobal tenants.”
Answering Questions from the Life Sciences Industry with Best Practices
With their often in-house built individual process, audits, and workflows, many life sciences companies wonder how to consistently get the best results from their safety database management, yet they have no way to uncover insights into what might align or differ from their peers. This cross-company analysis set out to answer not just how diverse colleagues standardize approaches, but also look at where they have found different best practices, and what a more formal, industry-wide standardization would look like.
True OOTB means a standardization of not just software, but confidence. Anyone and everyone who joins the LifeSphere next-gen platform should be certain that they are also getting a framework built on expertise and refined by experience.
As Claudia Lehmann, VP of Global Pharmacovigilance Operations at Boehringer-Ingelheim put it, “One of the benefits of the multi-tenant platform is that the users can rely on a widely used and tested system. The more we put in the standard of the system, the closer we come to this goal.” With the help of industry experts, ArisGlobal continues to work with its customers to become the gold standard of pharmacovigilance OOTB, from implementation to beyond, with partnerships that go beyond solutions.
Want to learn more? Explore what our customers have to say about how LifeSphere helps them optimize safety with end-to-end automation, artificial intelligence, and analytics.
ArisGlobal Launches LifeSphere NavaX™ 
