11 MLR review best practices to boost collaboration and efficiency

Medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) review is critical to your business operations. A well-oiled MLR machine is essential for getting content to market quickly to support key initiatives like commercializing your latest product or launching a new campaign.

Depending on the size of your organization, you may have entire teams and/or full-time employees solely dedicated to MLR review, participating in the process weekly or even daily. The average life science organization reviews about 2,000 pieces of advertising, promotional, or branded content annually–making MLR review a huge time and resource expense before taking the cost of storage or supplies into consideration. In short, the MLR review process is a big deal for your organization.

Despite the criticality and cost associated with MLR review, many life science organizations struggle to devise a process that is efficient, effective, and collaborative. But, it doesn’t have to be this way.

To help you optimize your MLR review process in both the short- and long-term, we developed an eBook containing a comprehensive collection of collaboration and process best practices. Here are a few excerpts from the eBook, focused on process best practices. Get access to the full eBook and bonus content by filling out the form below.

MLR Process Best Practices

Provide consistent, formalized training for new employees

Whenever a new hire joins your MLR team, set them up for success by training them on your company’s process, SOPs, team roles and responsibilities, and any systems you use. Be consistent in your training so that all employees have a common basis of understanding. In addition, offer an optional annual refresher on your process to all team members to maintain a consistent process.

Depending on the composition of your team, you may also consider organizing time for newer, greener employees to engage with their senior counterpart(s) in knowledge transfer to better understand how your organization approaches specific aspects of review, such as compliance.

Identify, capture, and measure MLR metrics

You can’t improve upon your MLR process unless you fully understand your process metrics and how you’re performing as a team. For organizations just beginning to gather MLR process data, start by identifying which metric(s) you want to capture. Examples include:

First pass acceptance rate
Average time to complete a job
Average review time

Not only do you need to capture MLR metrics, you need to actually measure and report on them too. In fact, some MLR software solutions will automatically capture this data for you. No matter your process, ensure your team understands your goals, what you’re measuring, and then report back on how you’re doing as a team. Understanding where you are successful and where you’re falling short is essential to optimizing your process over time.