The modern medicine owes its success to numerous clinical trials that took place to result in the perfect drug discovery. As a result, there has been an emergence of pharma clinical trial services, that deals with clinical research, wherein evidence-based trials are utilized to establish treatment, to be later used in the healthcare industry for treatment of patients. In the field of clinical research, the efficacy and safety of medicines, diagnostics, devices, and therapeutic regimens are tested for their subsequent successful use in the treatment of human diseases and conditions. Such clinical trial services are mainly provided by CROs that work for pharmaceutical, biotechnological, and medical device companies. Such companies provide them with solutions pertaining to new drug development, biological assays, and preclinical and clinical research. With pharmaceutical companies aggressively trying to discover new and effective drugs, the global spend in this category currently stands at $33.2 billion. (SpendEdge Procurement Market Research)

Major category requirements in pharma clinical trial services market

One of the major requirements from the service provider in this space is their ability to provide quality assurance. To offer quality assurance service providers should adhere to ICH & GCP guidelines, ISO certification, GMP compliance, IRB and IEC approvals, US FDA regulations, Internal QA audits, and SOPs. It is essential as clinical trials deal with testing on humans, which can be an ethical and legal issue in case of any malfunction during the trial of new drugs. Additionally, they should also be able to assist pharma companies in site allocation and patient recruitment for the efficient functioning of clinical trials.

Procurement challenges

It’s a common practice in pharma industry to engage with multiple service providers to obtain different services related to a trial. For instance, they may choose to engage with different providers for design optimization services and clinical laboratory services. However, the problem with engagement with multiple suppliers is that it can lead to inconsistency in the quality of services and also make it difficult in maintaining communication with CROs on a regular basis. Additionally, it also increases administrative costs associated with monitoring and managing multiple CROs and requires longer time-to-market for the new drug.

Procurement best practices

Although problems may arise when dealing with multiple partners, it is essential to maintain strategic relationships with them for optimal result. Companies should look to develop strategic and long-term partnerships with selected providers. Furthermore, pharma companies must also try to adopt the policy of insourcing by placing some of the employees from CROs at their premises. It not only helps CROs to gain better insights into buyers’ culture and facilitates but also better understand the process and communication between both the parties.

Suggested pricing model

One of the best pricing model favorable for consumers in this market is pay for performance pricing model. One of the most common pricing model adopted in this sector is that of pricing based on task completion. However, pay for performance model can provide incentive terms for CROs to focus on delivering the result. Furthermore, pharma companies can rather adopt pricing terms based on KPIs.

Price saving opportunities

Adoption of mHealth technologies has helped service providers to utilize portable platforms for capturing real-time data, which helps in achieving cost savings by reducing efforts for manual follow-up of patients. Additionally, adopting big data and could technologies also reduce data storage cost and saving companies valuable resources.

Read more about the procurement overview of the pharma clinical trial market along with procurement best practices, supply market landscape, pricing models, and technological advancements in SpendEdge’s upcoming report on the global clinical trial services market.

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