By Zahiah (Zee Zee) Gueddar, Senior Director, Commercial Strategy, IQVIA Clinical Trial Financial Suite
Clinical trial financial management is one of the most complex and high-stakes components of research operations. Sponsors and contract research organizations (CROs) must navigate intricate payment structures, evolving regulatory requirements, and increasing demands for transparency and speed. As clinical trials grow in scale and complexity, organizations face pressure to modernize financial management and evaluate whether to bring payments in-house.
As a first step, it is important to evaluate readiness to manage all requirements of insourcing payments. It requires careful consideration of regulatory and operational demands, which may necessitate the continued use of external services and partnerships. While the right technology can alleviate many resource-intensive tasks, there are considerations for outsourcing specialty services or those that address gaps within an organization’s domain expertise or infrastructure.
If your organization is considering insourcing clinical trial financial management and payments, keep these key factors in mind to ensure a seamless and successful transition to a SaaS platform or technology.
Understanding the organizational impacts of bringing payments in-house
Bringing payment activities in-house can require significant changes to staffing, internal processes, compliance requirements and more. Implementing a SaaS platform calls for a holistic approach, so it’s essential to conduct a readiness assessment to identify which aspects of financial management you’re prepared to manage internally. This assessment helps identify where new roles and infrastructure are needed, highlights organizational gaps and helps determine where existing positions, such as customer-facing roles, may need to expand to include payment or budget-related support for sites.
The assessment can also help you identify the financial management-related activities that are best suited for you to outsource. You may determine that certain activities are too costly and complex for your organization to own internally and that taking them on could increase the risk of delays and disruptions to the trial, sites and/or patients.
For example, the assessment may help you realize that the facilitation of site payments in certain countries may be better outsourced to a trusted partner. Successfully making payments to investigator sites in other countries requires meeting each nation’s unique regulatory requirements, and in some regions, this includes having a physical presence within their borders. Additionally, completing the required work and securing the necessary regulatory approvals and bank relationships to meet a single country’s requirements is a process that can take months. By using a hybrid approach of tech and partner services, you can facilitate payments in other countries through a partner and mitigate potential risks.
Choosing the right solution
Just as important as knowing what payment activities to outsource is knowing what solution will work best for you.
A software-as-a-service platform like IQVIA’s new Clinical Trial Financial Suite (CTFS), which unifies the full financial lifecycle of clinical trials, makes a compelling case for bringing financial management and payment activities in-house. While no technology alone can fully manage all the complexities of clinical trial financial management, leveraging advanced tools alongside domain expertise can illuminate the path to success.
IQVIA’s CTFS allows you to use the mix of SaaS and contracted services that are right for your needs. The CTFS payments module can ingest clinical trial agreements and automatically apply financial terms for each site with confidence scores. As invoices are submitted, the module can ingest and automatically process them. This significantly reduces manual work, accelerates payment turnaround and increases accuracy, which all directly impacts sponsor and site satisfaction.
The solutions you implement should prioritize site success, because when sites succeed, sponsors and CROs succeed as well. A unified platform that gives you control and oversight, data unification and artificial intelligence to move from doing to reviewing and from protocol ingestion to payment can help you achieve your strategic goals.
Integration with your existing systems is also important. In fact, a recent double-blind survey of 300 clinical operations executives conducted by Frost & Sullivan and sponsored by IQVIA revealed that the manual effort required to connect siloed systems and processes was cited as the top challenge when dealing with clinical trial financials.
Your SaaS module won’t operate in isolation. It will need to connect and share data with clinical trial management systems, electronic data capture systems and financial systems. The CTFS Site Payments module uses seamless integration capabilities to ease connections with other systems, allowing a successful implementation within any ecosystem.
Getting started
Moving payment activities in-house has significant benefits if you’re prepared. IQVIA can offer the balance you need.
IQVIA’s CTFS Site Payments module:
- Streamlines and connects financial processes across the entire clinical trial lifecycle, helping sponsors and CROs manage payments with greater efficiency, transparency and control.
- Supports operations in more than 190 countries, leveraging IQVIA’s established global banking network to enable timely payments to sites in their local currencies.
- Provides access to a dedicated global team with decades of experience and proven best practices in clinical trial payments — offering support for complex, high-risk and resource-intensive payment activities that may not make sense for you to manage internally today.
Learn more about how IQVIA can help you harness the right blend of technology and services for your payment strategy.