As government regulatory authorities tighten their grip on the pharma industry, firms are being required to adhere to increased standards of accountability and transparency and ensure all relevant staff are up to speed on the laws applicable to drug development and registration for compliance.
This can be a mountainous task, with over 100,000 legal documents surrounding the procedures and processes required in the biopharma/lifesciences industry and around 15,000 regulatory updates released ever year.
"The regulatory environment is evolving and the needs of those involved are constantly changing," said David Blythell, senior instructional designer at Zenosis, a UK-based firm providing regulatory and compliance training software for the pharma industry.
Traditional classroom- and paper-based regulatory training methods can also be a huge cost for a company, who has to cover such expenses as instructor, venue, travel and accommodation as well as staff productivity losses.
According to Zenosis, e-learning allows for a cost- and time-effective way to achieve the same, if not better, training results.
"Accenture Consulting have reported that 70 per cent less time is needed for training when using e-learning," said Zenosis, who were present at this year's ACRP conference in Brussels and CPhI show in Paris.
"At the end of 2004, one of the top five global pharmaceutical organisations revealed that for every training dollar it spent on e-learning, it saved $9."
Referring to case studies conducted by big firms such as Intel and IBM, Zenosis also said that e-learning can improve employee job performances by 15-20 per cent over traditional methods and content retention was improved by 20-25 per cent.
In addition, e-learning software solutions also offer the advantage of support tracking, report tracking and certification of compliance training, the firm said.