By Benjamin Ross

November 13, 2017 | Greenphire, a King of Prussia, Pennsylvania-based global clinical trial payment technology company, is hoping to continue relieving the delays and distractions that come from the financial burdens on clinical trial sites. The company’s products, ClinCard and eClinicalGPS, were developed in 2008 to assist clinical trial sites on both ends of the financial spectrum: acquiring funds from sponsors and compensating patients for trial participation.

ClinCard automates global participant stipends and reimbursements, and places them on a reloadable card for patients to use anywhere a debit card is accepted. eClinicalGPS, Greenphire’s financial software for site-centric sponsors, streamlines site payments, ensuring sites get paid on a monthly basis, keeping trials on track.

Greenphire offers a software license relationship with its clients. Self-labeled by Greenphire’s Chief Executive Officer, Jim Murphy as a “part SaaS Clinical payment/part fintech” company, they are a payments-blended technology company that provides a wide range of options for its clients, from enterprise-based collaborations to collaborations on a trial-by-trial basis.

Murphy told Clinical Informatics News that Greenphire started 10 years ago with the goal of solving a “thorny problem” for clinical trial sites: managing reimbursements and stipend payments for investigative sites.

According to Greenphire, clinical trial sites often deal with the administrative burden of cashflow: managing, invoicing, and ultimately getting the financial payments and support on a timely basis to conduct research and properly allocate resources to go through recruiting patients.

“Investigative site payments have long been recognized as a major pain point along the drug development continuum,” according to a Greenphire white paper. “Too often, the processes by which payments to sites by CROs and Sponsors are made are complicated, burdensome, time-consuming, and frustrating, which can significantly impact a site’s performance. Additionally, sites are often left waiting for timely payments, which can leave them with resource shortfalls.”

The manual process of filing invoices and distributing payment is one that has the potential to delay a trial. This can be disastrous, according to Murphy, who says that most sites have less than three months operating cash available. He says that there is a desire and a need for control that, without strong technology, is very labor intensive.

“Ultimately, we consider those challenges to be our challenges,” Murphy said. “We want to eliminate them because we know that by making sites successful, we’ll make sponsors successful and we’ll improve care for patients.”

eClinicalGPS and ClinCard streamline and accelerate site payments and patient reimbursement through a centralized, web-based solution. eClinicalGPS can be configured to any type of clinical trial design and budget; ClinCard, likewise, can be configured to any type of patient schedule.

The ultimate goal of these two products is transparency. Greenphire wants to provide end-to-end solutions that solve the main, underlying issues of clinical trial site management.

“There are lots of different concepts out there, and maybe components of solutions,” said Murphy. “But there’s nothing transformative by just taking a component of a big process and making that one piece electronic. The transformation comes by looking holistically at the process end-to-end and reengineering it to eliminate some of the steps that are burdensome.”

Murphy is excited both for Greenphire’s accomplishments to date, as well as its potential. He says that nearly ten thousand sites worldwide have used ClinCard, streamlining five million clinical trial reimbursements for close to 900,000 patients in more than 25 countries; eClinicalGPS has been responsible for over 700,000 payments in site payment automation.

As Greenphire grows they will continue to add capabilities that are complimentary to their core. “We want to transform the market,” Murphy said. “[We want to] spend our energy helping people use [eClinicalGPS and ClinCard] to the maximum benefit and get back wide spread adoption.”