Healthcare corporate transportation for pharma, biotech and device teams

Medical conference transportation for a life sciences company usually has three layers at the same congress: the company's own booth, medical affairs and commercial staff; faculty, consultants and advisory board members the company is permitted to host; and executive or investor meetings on the margins. Each layer has different rules on what the company may pay for and what must be recorded.

Large medical society meetings often run their own shuttle system between official hotels and the convention center for registered attendees, so a company rarely needs to duplicate it. The company's effort goes into what the society does not cover: staff moves at the start and end of exhibit hours, an advisory board held in a hotel across town, an evening symposium, or a leadership team moving between investor meetings.

Investigator meetings follow the same logic on a smaller scale: site staff arriving on many flights into one hotel, a two-day agenda and an evening event. Accessible vehicles belong in the first brief. DOT rules let charter coach (over-the-road bus) operators ask for up to 48 hours' advance notice to provide an accessible bus, so late requests are harder to meet.

It can be. Under the federal Open Payments program, drug and medical device companies report certain payments and transfers of value to covered recipients such as physicians, and CMS lists travel and lodging, defined to include costs such as airfare, mileage and cab fare, among the reported natures of payment. Whether a specific ride is reportable is a decision for your compliance team.

The practical consequence is that a transportation record has to be attributable to individual people, not just to an event. A single invoice line for an advisory board shuttle is not enough if your team needs to assign a value to each physician who rode.

Illustrative: a minibus carries 18 advisory board participants from a hotel to a meeting venue and back. If your policy allocates shared transportation per rider, the record needs the vehicle cost, the passenger list for each leg and the allocation method your team chose. Building that into the booking takes far less effort than reconstructing it from a monthly invoice.

Corporate Travel USA does not decide reportability, file reports or hold any compliance certification. We can scope trip records in the format your team specifies.