ACT: What are some trends that you’re currently seeing with patient reimbursement?
I mentioned the cost of travel reimbursement, those things have dramatically increased in light of inflation and pressures in recent years. They’ve also increased because the average distance traveled for a participant to get to their clinical research site has increased materially. In fact, in oncology, it’s up more than 40% over the last five, six years, so that shows that people are having to go further. If you’re a working age person, it’s a lot of time off work, that’s opportunity cost, that’s direct pressure on you, so there’s a lot of considerations about figuring out what services are necessary and being very targeted in that approach that are a need that is constantly expressed to us, that is important for essentially starting the trial out on the right path.
Then the last one, I think, is really important is recognizing that especially as we’re trying to make sure that clinical research is open to folks of every socioeconomic class, minimizing that out of pocket expense from the start often is solved by providing travel support, where the participant never pays for it and doesn’t have to get reimbursed, it’s managed for them, which really takes away a huge stress and an obstacle to enrollment and ultimately, retention. I would say those are a couple of the big ones. There are a number of smaller trends than that people want real-time payments, that’s a common theme where patients feel valued walking out of the clinic with a ting on their phone. There’s more triggered payments than we’ve seen historically, so people are hooking up things that are done at home and rewarding protocol compliance like ePRO to trigger micropayments and things like that. All of those things are on the rise, but I would say the macro picture is there’s an appreciation that the patient is going through a great deal beyond their health situation in order to be in a clinical trial, and that sponsors are committed to helping sites mitigate those burdens for the participant and certainly, sponsors are trying to do it in ways that don’t just displace the effort onto the site or some other third party, they’re looking to eliminate it in more strategic ways, leveraging the right balance between technology and service.