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Over recent years, many good articles have been written about outsourcing in clinical studies. Most of these refer to outsourcing of trials by pharma companies to clinical research organisations, and cover all aspects from cost benefit analysis, supplier selection process, scorecards, performance measurement and management of customer and supplier relationships. At the risk of being inundated with responses from readers advising me to the contrary, I cannot recollect reading any articles regarding outsourcing of a company’s medical equipment requirements for clinical studies to a single supplier.
In many ways, this is understandable, as initiation of an outsourcing project is often instigated by senior levels within a business such as board members and directors. For the majority of clinical trials, the total cost of medical equipment is a very low figure, often less than two per cent of the trial cost. For this reason, medical equipment will rarely appear on senior management’s radar unless it has been the cause of serious delays or caused impairment of the results of a trial. |
