For health care companies completing arduous clinical trials, there's a saying that every day is worth $1 million. Completing the paperwork required to meet regulations and pay doctors can cost pharmaceutical and biotech companies quite a few extra days.
CFS Clinical, based in Audubon, Pa., reduces the time and money spent on forms by automating the process. Using internal proprietary software called
InSite, CFS reduces "study startup" -- the time spent signing up patients and proving a site's FDA compliance -- by 20 percent. The platform also works with a global banking network to manage payments to physicians, reducing wait time from up to four months to one month.
According to Kevin Williams, VP of Corporate Development, CFS is the first company to focus exclusively on the business and financial management of clinical trials. The niche has proved lucrative. CFS currently works with seven of the top 20 international pharmaceutical companies and this past year the company (founded in 2001) has grown their revenue and employee base by 50 percent. They now have 75 employees and expect to hire 10 to 15 more within the next year. Positions are available in accounting, software development and project management.
CFS continues to innovate. The company recently added a "
Business Intelligence" service that shows clients all their InSite transactions. Starting next year,
The Sunshine Act mandates healthcare providers disclose all payment information to the federal government.
"The process of actually making payments in the clinical research world is a bit backwards," says Williams. "We make the payments on the pharmaceutical company's behalf, then we aggregate that data and provide it back to them so they can report it."
The payments clinical trials make to physicians -- collectively dubbed "clinical grant spend" -- cover recruiting patients, screening patients, conducting trials and collecting clinical data. Williams says this portion accounts for 40 to 60 percent of a trial's entire budget. According to the
February 2011 issue of Focus, clinical grant spend leads to $13 billion in worldwide clinical trial spending. By amassing data from thousands of trials, CFS can predict this cost for individual trials.
"Trials, in terms of their timelines, are very volatile," says Williams. "They speed up, they slow down, they're behind, they change timelines. That has significant financial impact. We’re basically empowering our clients to control their finances much better."
Source: Kevin Williams, CFS Clinical
Writer: Dana Henry