So says Marcus Thornton, CEO of Raleigh, NC-based Clinical Force, a player in the growing clinical trial management system (CTMS) market dominated by Oracle eClinical, Perceptive Informatics IMPACT, and ClinPhone. Increasingly, sponsors are purchasing CTMS specifically to deal with their payment woes.

It was a particularly rewarding experience for one Clinical Force client that paid for first-year implementation costs with savings from an imbedded Clinical Payments module. “If [the sponsor] had had to outsource the payment process to a CRO [contract research organization], it would have cost upwards of $30,000.”

The current site payment process is notoriously inefficient, even in companies that have electronic data capture (EDC) in place, says Thornton. CROs find it difficult to handle payments on behalf of sponsors because they have no means to automate the process, and thus they charge a lot to do it. “A large study has up to 70,000 [payment-related] transactions,” with each payment request taking a whopping 120 days to process. The irony is that some of these same companies make milestone payments to sites to encourage investigators to “move quickly.”

Since the Clinical Payments module can be purchased à la carte for less than $10,000 and deployed with or without EDC, says Thornton, more and more sponsors are choosing to manage the payment process in-house. The module automatically generates payments as study visits get completed, reimburses sites for variable costs such as shipping fees, and handles all spending approvals. It also does accrual reporting for liabilities incurred but not yet paid.

“Finance people really enjoy using our system,” says Thornton. “They want to spend time analyzing data and uncovering real costs.” That leaves companies in a position to “negotiate better contracts…and work at devising better payment methods.”

The time-savings from automating the payment process are huge. One Clinical Force customer figured that, for one large study, a staff member was devoting 30 hours a week to divvying out checks, says Thornton. “And that company has 200 studies to manage at any one time.”

Thornton says there has been an upsurge in inquiries about the Clinical Payments module, now in its second release, since mid-2007. That coincided with a shift in marketing focus from CROs to sponsors. “For CROs, the first order of business is getting CRAs [clinical research associates] to do more monitoring visits and better internal communication and reporting,” which are other areas of expertise for subscription-based Clinical Force.

At present, “less than 10 percent” of sponsor companies use any kind of site payment software, says Thornton, though he expects to see wholesale change in this arena in the next couple of years. Ideally, this will happen by integrating CTMS and EDC. But adoption of EDC is still at best 50 percent industry-wide, and most integration still occurs as a one-time event on larger studies with a CRO’s preferred EDC vendor.

No matter. The Clinical Payments module is still advantageous when used independent of EDC. Paper-based site monitoring reports can be used to trigger payments, says Thornton. The payment process could be reduced to about six weeks, versus three weeks using EDC.

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This article first appeared in Bio-IT World’s eCliniqua newsletter. Click here for a free subscription to eCliniqua.