Transforming Clinical Trial Site Forecasting

In today’s ever-evolving clinical trial space, managing the expenses associated with conducting a study is more important – and fraught – than ever before. The impact of rising interest rates, inflation, and tighter venture capital all serve to squeeze the budgets of emerging biotechs, more than half of which have less than two years’ worth of cash on hand to fund operations, according to a report from Ernest & Young. Forecasting site payments is a crucial part of managing this uncertainty, and is equally mired in its own complexity, as trial sponsors must understand future spends based on up-to-date actuals and site contracts to deploy teams that can develop the forecast manually on a study-by-study basis. The traditional approach to forecasting is often resource-intensive and costly, limiting its frequency and precision and rendering it inconsistent across studies and portfolios.

Competition among sponsors for the best trial sites suited to their studies is intensifying across the clinical trial landscape. For many sites, sponsor-of-choice initiatives are leveraged widely today to improve site experience by rewarding consistent, streamlined workflows and practices on the part of sponsors. This includes payment processes and solutions that are timely, reliable, accurate, and efficient. In order to win over the world’s most competitive sites, sponsors must consider how best to forecast costs in order to enable more on-time and reliable payment practices. By employing forecasting services that can inform adaptable, proactive insights into future spending and offer consistent, automated methodologies, sponsors can leverage planning and budget management for increasingly complex studies.