By Benjamin Ross

July 25, 2018 | Greenphire has had a productive twelve months. On top of announcing new configurations to their site payment and reimbursement tools, the clinical trial payment technology company has announced a partnership with rideshare company Lyft.

A clinical trial site’s needs are different by trial and also by patient, Greenphire’s CEO, Jim Murphy, told Clinical Informatics News. With that in mind, the company has been focusing on the flexibility of their platforms.

“We wanted to focus on the expansion of our [tools] so that [they] can support every engagement model that we can conceive,” Murphy said. “Whether we’re facilitating the funding, whether it’s being facilitated by the trial sponsor themselves or their CRO, or there’s a mixture based on country or regulation, all of those capabilities are easily turned on or off and allows us to have the most mature, flexible solution that’s available.”

The partnership with Lyft is also a result of that commitment to flexibility, Murphy said. Sponsors will be able to activate Lyft’s functionality through Greenphire’s ClinCard software.

“Since we are already providing reimbursement for taxi rides and parking, it was a natural extension to be able to provide more of a local ride opportunity that we can facilitate payment directly for,” said Murphy. This leaves essentially no burden on the site coordinator and allows staff at clinical trial sites to know when their patients will be arriving on site in real time.

One of the most common scenario would be the study coordinator trying to help facilitate transportation for a number of patients, all of them having particular ways of getting to the clinical trial site.

“There’s a great deal of variance in what’s needed at the patient level,” Murphy explained. “And for a study coordinator having to login to 8 different systems to accommodate 8 different ways where they can help is just difficult. Having to figure out how to pay for 8 different things and aggregate the accounting aspects is significantly burdensome.”

Greenphire’s collaboration with Lyft allows the economics of site reimbursement to be configured on one system. 

The companies began piloting their collaborative efforts over a year ago. Murphy said he was pleased with Lyft’s commitment to Greenphire’s vision of providing a service that wasn’t “one-size-fits-all”.

“[Lyft] was eager to help us create a solution that was tailored for the clinical trial environment,” said Murphy. “There was a great deal of refinement along the way that ultimately helped us develop a very rich solution in the end.”

Murphy sees this collaboration as a positive step forward for the clinical trial industry, saying that a mainstream company’s interest in healthcare and clinical research can only be a good thing.

“The clinical research setting is distinct because you’re talking about small, narrow use cases and not about macro-populations,” Murphy said. “But nonetheless it is interesting to see how open-minded [Lyft is] to see an area of healthcare where there’s a growth opportunity and need.”

Other companies have seen the opportunity as well, with Uber launching their own patient- transportation dashboard this year. Murphy welcomes the growth in the field, saying Greenphire is continually focused on enhancing their network.

“I’m sure that there will be partnerships with others, and that’s fine with us,” Murphy said. “We’re focused on an area we think is really special.”