Why specialization is so important for Life Science & BioScience companies

In November 2023, US Radiology Specialist was fined $450,000 by New York AG over a data breach. But why is this a warning signal that all businesses in Life Sciences, BioSciences and Healthcare must pay attention to?

Companies in the Life Sciences & BioScience sectors are continuously growing their ecosystem of vendors and third-party connections. As a result, their risk around vendor compliance, supply chain, credit risk and cyber breaches also increases.

SecurityScorecard’s February 2024 report finds that “healthcare has the highest volume [of third-party attacks]” above all other sectors.

Through Gatekeeper’s software, businesses can ensure that every vendor or third-party connection is being monitored in real-time, ensuring that any data breach, cyber attack or credit risk is automatically detected and a risk management workflow triggered.

Having this in place for these businesses gives back crucial time to the team who are building the business itself.

What are the risks of poor vendor relationship management?

• Fined - due to failed compliance - when a vendor in your supply chain/vendor base does not adhere to legislations, this puts you at risk of failing compliance
• Bleeding cash - when you do not have visibility across all vendor contracts, you auto-renew vendor/supplier contracts as you did not get a chance to review, renegotiate or terminate
• Paying fraudulent (unauthorized) vendors - when a robust vendor onboarding process is not in place you cannot see who is approved or not
• Heavy administrative burden - manually inputting the data and updating information across multiple data sources is time-consuming
• Breaches of data - third-party vendors experiencing data breaches makes you liable for fines as well

How do I know if my business is at risk?

There are a few indicators which quickly ascertain whether your business is likely to be bleeding cash from neglected vendor management (which by the way, are relevant for the majority of businesses in this sector today):

• Managing vendors and contracts across several tools
• Using a combination of spreadsheets, email and shared drives
• Struggling to track key dates, including renewals and expiries
• Responding reactively to change rather than proactively
• Finding it difficult to track vendor performance and obligation fulfillment

These issues are caused by manual and disconnected vendor and contract management processes - ways of working which are increasingly proving inadequate

Are you a Sikich client and want to learn more? Join Our Breakfast Workshop in Boston, August 27 2024

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