Health IT, Pharma

Run a clinical trial, get paid faster — Clinverse raises $3.8M for software

The clinical trials process is becoming more of an electronic endeavor as the proliferation of […]

The clinical trials process is becoming more of an electronic endeavor as the proliferation of data sparks new software to efficiently manage it. But one aspect of these studies has remained manual and slow: payment to the doctors who run the studies.

Clinical trials technology company Clinverse has developed cloud-based software that overcomes the payment lag to clinical trial investigators. The Raleigh, North Carolina company has now raised $3.8 million in funding to rapidly roll out the software to a wider array of pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organizations who can use the product. Hatteras Venture Partners led the series B round with participation from Vital Financial.

Clinical investigators are paid according to contracts that are all separately negotiated depending on the experiment. Payment is determined by matching whether the clinical trial site met the terms set out in the contract language — a process that’s done manually by people poring over spreadsheets and emails, explained Clinverse CEO Tim Immel.

Manual review of the contracts is slow and error prone, Immel said. Clinverse has developed software that analyzes the metadata from the trials and compares it to the contracts. If the system finds that the contract terms were met, it generates a payment to the investigator. Under the current manual payment processes, an investigator can go unpaid for as long as six months.

“We can take that down to weeks,” Immel said.

Immel founded Clinverse in 2008 having seen the payment problem in his previous position as chief financial officer of Naryx Pharma. Immel said that clinical trial management systems that CROs use to manage data generated from clinical trials are not equipped to manage investigator payments. The market of paying service providers to conduct clinical trials is estimated to be $70 billion a year. Immel said that of the $70 billion, $14 billion represents payments to investigators. He adds that timely payment of investigators will speed up the clinical trials process because, “you can’t do a clinical trial without paying investigators.”

Clinverse raised $2.2 million in a 2009 series A round with Vital Financial. The ClinPay software product launched in the first quarter of last year but Immel said that the company’s market entry was a quiet one. Now, the company is ready for rapid expansion, necessitating the additional capital infusion. ClinPay software works with 140 currencies, an important feature as clinical trials increasingly become global.

Immel declined to identify any customers but he said that the ClinPay software is being used by large and small companies in the pharmaceuticals space. Besides growing that customer base, Immel said Clinverse would develop additional software capabilities. He declined to specify any features Clinverse is pursuing.

[Photo from flickr user stopnlook]

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