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EPC: What are some of the challenges sites face when trying to be paid?
Dave Espenshade: A site’s ability to receive accurate and timely payments from sponsors or CROs is one of the most challenging processes it faces while conducting clinical trials. In fact, we often hear that payment terms are the biggest driver in a site’s ability to support a clinical study.
There are many reasons why this is such a challenge, with invoice adjudication being the biggest contributor to the limited transparency in the payment process. From a sponsor or CRO perspective, invoices are arriving in a variety of formats and often at different intervals. This causes a number of inconsistencies that their finance teams need to unravel to determine what work was performed, what rate was contracted, and what needs to be paid. This is a complex and difficult process, and, as a result, many sponsors and CROs pay their sites on a quarterly basis to keep up with this workload.
This time gap between services rendered and payment, along with the errors that often occur with payments, is one of the biggest challenges that sites face.
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