European Healthcare Compliance Program - Seton Hall School of Law - Perceptions and Feedback

This summer, I’ve participated in the European Healthcare Compliance Program held in Paris by the Seton Hall Law University.

It was a five days’ intensive and comprehensive program that focused on very different areas of Healthcare Compliance, including Privacy.

Why did I do it? On one hand I believe that these kind of programs, which focus on very specialized education for a very specific industry, are key to our professional development. On the other hand, the networking opportunities and interactions with professionals from all over the world is outstanding and very useful.

The European Healthcare Compliance Program is well drafted and organized, with excellent presenters and topics to discuss. The interactions between the participants and the organizers, including the presenters, is very good and allows us to learn a bit more every minute of every day.

The group of colleagues was also very interesting, mainly people from the Pharma industry but also people from the Medtech sector were there. CRO’s were not represented even though clinical trials and research studies were mentioned several times.

The company that offered the program to the biggest number of employees was J&J, if I’m not mistaken they were eight in total from all over the world, but there were many other companies, with one or two employees who were participating too.

My feedback from the program is very positive in general, and I would like to be able to participate in other editions in the future, because it’s not only about what you learn from the presentations, which of course will change every year, but how much information and experience you gain from the interactions with other participants, who may or may not be different every year but have learned more and have more to discuss than the year before.

To conclude, I’ve realized that the way people approach healthcare compliance is completely different from the way people approach privacy compliance in general.

Healthcare compliance have moved away from the idea of regulations and strict rules, to be more about ethics; contrarily in Privacy, if the law doesn’t prohibit it, we can consider it to be acceptable.

The decision in healthcare compliance is about two variants being evaluated together “what is right” and “what seems right”, it’s about perception and that is the reason why it is so sensible; companies can’t risk to look bad, even though they are legally right, as the position of the parties (companies vs patients) is not equal.

In certain cases, when you work in Privacy for the healthcare sector, same considerations about ethics and perception have to be taken into account, but it’s not mandatory nor very often we see them happening, at least not proactively.

In any case, it’s important to remind that in the healthcare sector, a simple appearance of wrongdoing can put companies in a tight stop, so it’s always better to take into account all variants of a case and keep in mind that considering business interests is not always a question of profit but also a question of credibility which on the long run is directly linked to profit.

Moving forward I’ll introduce some topics regarding healthcare compliance in the blog, as I believe the future of privacy in the healthcare industry will pass from an integration of ethical principles too, and compliance and privacy, even though they focus on different aspects of the business, will end-up working under the same values and principles.

I hope this feedback is interesting to you and if you’re considering the program feel free to ask any specific question.

Best,

DCA