Top 2 Hurdles Research Sites Face in Budget Negotiations

Negotiating budgets for clinical trials can cause a lot headaches, particularly at the site-level. Most sites already have ideas for optimizing their operations, but can’t quite “get to yes” during budgetary discussions with sponsors.

In our experience, sites face two structural disadvantages when hammering out study budgets with sponsors:

Negotiating study budgets requires unique talents.
Negotiators of clinical trial budgets must mix the business savvy of executives with the regulatory insight of lawyers. It can be challenging building the right toolbox of skills, business development experience and industry connections that are outside the wheelhouse of most research sites. Moreover, medical researchers are often focused on providing excellent patient care and quality study data, rather than budget details (i.e. improving the future of medicine).
Negotiations require extensive planning and tracking.
In our experience, research site staff is just too busy to fully optimize their negotiating strategies. When preparing for long-term contract talks, you need to pre-determine your site’s goals and potential deal breakers. You should also identify scenarios which require speedy escalation or approval and set up a process for tracking external and internal communications. At most research sites, these concerns take a backseat to patient care, data collection, and regulatory compliance.

Because of these two disadvantages, we’ve found that sites are in a stronger negotiating position when they have an experienced partner on
their side of the table and group together in a network. Site networks like BTC Network are able to consistently negotiate at least a 20-40% increase in study budgets because:

We have the industry experience necessary to maximize your site’s leverage
Our relationships with sponsors/CROs can strengthen your site’s bargaining power
We have expertise needed to optimize your site’s negotiating strategy

If you want to learn more about how we approach negotiations on behalf of our network of sites, watch the webinar “Art of Negotiation” below or fill out the form below and one of our experts will contact you directly!

Watch Webinar The Art Of Negotiation