Our Innovative Core
Within the healthcare sector specifically, our customers appreciate our expertise managing unique traveler types including HCPs and patients. Our experience balances the drivers of sophisticated corporate programs with the delicate, complex and specific needs of these traveler populations. This expertise means our customers benefit from teams that go beyond travel fulfillment. We are a partner that speaks your language, who understands your industry, your compliance requirements, and your keen focus on the patient experience.
HCP and Group Travel
With our group travel models, our customers maintain the enhanced service delivery they expect with standardization across all markets and the benefits of an enterprise solution. In fact, more than 75% of our group travel clients leverage their corporate discounts. Further, our proprietary tool, DecisionSource®, allows for per meeting reporting across different traveler types. We also realize that the attendee persona is changing and travelers are looking for simple online solutions to manage their travel needs. Over 66% of our group travel customers offer online booking options via their meeting technology.
Our customers additionally benefit from our best-in-class registration-to-booking experience. Our end-to-end approach allows external meeting attendees to book online via Concur with API data integrations that simplify planning activities through automated cost and itinerary reporting as well as post-meeting transfer of value intelligence. This creates time-saving efficiencies and compliance confidence while enhancing the attendee experience.
Integrated Travel & Meetings (ITM)
Life sciences are among the industries with the most sophisticated travel and meetings programs. Our expertise across a robust, shared client base allows us to identify and maximize opportunities to break down the typical servicing silos to create holistic programs that lend visibility, transparency, efficiency and solutions across both services. In fact, 55% of our customers have shared internal oversight to travel and meetings, allowing for optimization that includes:
- Policy
- Operational workflows
- Stakeholder engagement
- Leveraged savings
- Preferred supplier relationships
- Sustainability
- Duty of Care
- Business analytics
- Benchmarking
- Strategic planning
Our unique Integrated Travel & Meetings maturity models provide consultative insight on total program maturity
Global Program Governance & Progressive Program Management (PPM)
Adapting to business requirements is crucial to the overall success of a well-managed, transformative program. BCD is breaking the mold with our progressive model, which powers programs to move with the speed, agility and diversification that our most mature and sophisticated programs need to adapt now and evolve as the industry – and the world – continues to change.
Based on seven competencies, we provide a cross-functional team of subject matter experts and thought leaders to support your program, company strategies and policies through a mix of dedicated and designated resources.
75% of our PPM customers are within the life sciences industry, which transforms programs across the following:
- Service strategy & optimization
- Traveler, attendee & stakeholder engagement
- Digital strategy & execution
- Spend management & distribution optimization
- Data management, analytics & visualizations
- Payment strategy & execution
- Sustainability
"We found solutions together. The whole team worked to drive progress. All of our reputations were on the line, and we were all equally committed to making it work."
Kerrie Henshaw-Cox
Global Commercial Lead, AstraZeneca Business Travel Awards’ Travel Buyer of the Year for 2019
"In BCD, we found a valued strategic partner that knows and treats our business as if it’s their own. Their particular expertise in the life sciences space provides a peace of mind that our program will be supported across all the drivers that matter most to Takeda."
Michelle De Costa
Head, Global Travel, Meetings & Events, Fleet, and Aviation Meetings and Travel Center of Excellence Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited
Kerrie Henshaw-Cox
Global Commercial Lead, AstraZeneca Business Travel Awards’ Travel Buyer of the Year for 2019
We found solutions together. The whole team worked to drive progress. All of our reputations were on the line, and we were all equally committed to making it work.
"BCD has been a wonderful partner in the set up and development of our patient travel solution. Their partnership has been integral to the development of the solution from a process and logistical perspective. The entire team's attention to detail makes me confident they were a great choice to work with our patient’s in booking travel."
Amber Maldonado
Senior Program Manager, Vendor Management, Patient Services Biogen
"We found solutions together. The whole team worked to drive progress. All of our reputations were on the line, and we were all equally committed to making it work."
Kerrie Henshaw-Cox
Global Commercial Lead, AstraZeneca Business Travel Awards’ Travel Buyer of the Year for 2019
Compliance
We know compliance goes beyond in-channel bookings. For life sciences, compliance is the guiding principle for business enablement.
From transfer of value reporting to country profile guidance, from meal caps to annual trainings, BCD has a robust understanding of how critically important adherence is to success. Our teams are fortified with SOPs, global guidebooks, and resource guides, all refreshed annually or more frequently based on regulatory changes. Our custom materials augment our customer-specific requirements and create a baseline of foundational discipline across our service lines and reporting. Our compliance approach is powered by proprietary technology to streamline processes and allow online reimbursement of HCPs.
Given our broad exposure to a spectrum of life sciences organizations, we are also able to provide compliance benchmarks and policy insights via customer forums or targeted consultation. We understand how integrity, transparency and protection are paramount, and we deliver against them every day.
Duty of care
We go beyond the transaction to ensure your travelers and meeting attendees are safe while on the road through our digital platforms, services, robust reporting and integration with security services. Our oversight and proactive care allow for business continuity and quick response, should the need arise. We have additionally developed proprietary tools to report all passenger names on an itinerary even when booked as a “true group” providing comprehensive insight to your global travelers. Our duty of care for meeting attendees extends to destinations, hotels, and venues.
Life sciences organizations that are ready to explore emerging patient engagement opportunities for R&D may find that many can be addressed through process improvement."
Deloitte
Patient Engagement for Life Sciences R&D
Improve the patient travel experience
While patient-centricity is a primary focus for life sciences, patient travel and logistics fulfillment is an oft-overlooked area, relying on agencies with varying competencies to manage. With more than 20 customers in the patient space, BCD’s heightened focus on this population extends across all patient interactions to include patient advocacy and caregivers, transplants and medical needs, clinical trial participation, and improved payment and reimbursement solutions, all with associated communications and campaign strategies that enhance patient engagement.
Seamless Patient Experience
We recognize that patients are people first and they must consider potential physical, emotional, and financial burdens prior to travel. When weighing participation, patients must balance their overall health status, family logistics, daily obligations, contingency planning, and loss of earned income – all while coping with disease and treatment. Challenges related to booking travel should not be on that list. That’s why we have customized solutions in place to optimize the travel process, from booking through reimbursement.
Clinical trial patient travel
Travel management is not a core clinical competency. Minimal visibility, limited use of negotiated contracts and incomplete duty of care coverage are prompting many organizations to reevaluate their model. We know that the success of a clinical trial requires personal commitment. Challenges related to booking travel and timely reimbursement should not be on their list of considerations. That’s why we’re focused on providing custom clinical trial solutions to improve the experience, improve retention rates, reduce study team burden, lower costs and enhance program rigor.
We deliver our services with an empathetic, discreet, and white-glove approach reducing drop-out rates while increasing satisfaction and advocacy. We extend patient engagement beyond live visits by staying in regular contact through their journey, adding additional reassurance and support so critical toward maintaining participation.
Our comprehensive solutions enhance the patient booking and reimbursement experience through our dedicated Patient Engagement Specialists, who will ensure that your patients benefit from the heightened service and experience that is so important to ongoing trial participation. Additionally, customers recognize greater value from our payment and reimbursement solutions, technology, reporting, and ability to leverage existing supplier rates and discounts.
Special Needs Facilitation
Patient-centricity requires elevated, compassionate servicing solutions. We know patient travel frequently requires enhanced service delivery and special needs facilitation including ADA and specialized ground transportation requirements.
Safety Reassurance
We know that the risk of travel-related issues is much greater for patients than for the average corporate traveler. That doesn’t begin and end with travel bookings. We ensure the highest standards for patient travelers and their caregivers by including them in your corporate security response.
Compliance Assurance
Compliance assurance, aggregated reporting, and transactional visibility are critical to life sciences and patient costs should not be excluded. Bringing together both individual and category level spend allows our customers to ensure adherence to regulatory and reputational requirements at both a micro and macro level.
Leveraged Suppliers and Spend
By bringing patients into the corporate program, customers gain enterprise visibility to spend, improving holistic negotiation power, driving process efficiencies, and ensuring consistency against contractual terms.
Study Team Optimization
Site coordinators and CROs should not need to double as travel agents. Our seamless end-to-end support allows all study stakeholders and partners, including BCD, to deliver against their core competencies with 100 percent focus on the patient.
Global visibility
Managing patient travel and logistics in a consolidated manner lends enterprise level visibility to performance, transparency, cost, and compliance. Our flexible models allow for customization at the study level without sacrificing the larger organizational benefits.
Payment Solutions
We recognize how important it is to limit any financial burden on the patient. Our solutions from up-front payment, to reimbursement, to a partnership for reloadable debit cards, ensure that patients can participate with ease while still providing spend and reconciliation transparency.
Technology
Our existing tools, technology, API integrations and configurations provide solutions across the patient travel, logistics and payment space to enhance the patient experience while driving a comprehensive roadmap strategy.
Patient Engagement and Campaigns
Because we know that engagement goes far beyond logistics, we have sophisticated campaign strategies that begin at policy development, study enrollment and informed consent. Our team of experts use the right message to the right channel matching health literacy and communication styles.
Third-party innovation
Travel and meetings programs are more sophisticated than ever. That’s why we created a marketplace of authorized technology solutions to extend your corporate programs. As new technologies emerge, our marketplace keeps your program up to date by giving you access to our carefully curated set of providers to customize your program beyond traditional services.
Innovative digital services
Our proprietary business intelligence platform provides comprehensive data insights across transient and group travel. Our customizable dashboards transform your intelligence into actionable insights, allowing you to make effective decisions for your program in critical traveler and attendee care moments.
Sustainability
At BCD, we measure success beyond our ability to oversee a travel and meetings program. We’ve set a high bar for ourselves to be good global citizens, transparent and genuine partners and an engaging and diverse employer. This is more than a talking point, it’s our ethos, which is why we’re incredibly proud of the accomplishments that have led to recognition by the industry, our peers and clients across Governance, Ethics & Compliance, Workplace Practices, Diversity & Inclusion, Sustainable Procurement and Charity & Community Support.