Clinical Maestro CORE is the first-to-market and only SaaS solution designed for clinical trial costing by clinical trial costing experts. CORE directly contributes both to increasing the proposal win rate through greater accuracy and reliability of proposal budgets, and to lowering the cost of generating bids through more efficient utilization of internal service provider resources. Equipped with all the bells and whistles of a true technology-enabled costing tool, CORE takes the stress out of creating a clinical trial budget and allows you to focus on your winning strategy, while differentiating from the crowd.
State of Industry: Clinical Trial Services Costing
In 2019, Strategikon began surveying and interviewing CRO industry leaders across all sizes and geographies to learn about the state of the industry regarding clinical services costing. We learned that the vast majority of the clinical service providers are still costing complex clinical trials in vulnerable Excel or Excel-based home-grown costing tools that are prone to errors, difficult to maintain and train on, and are subject to intellectual property theft. Most responders said that current costing tools “need improvement”, and they were concerned with the reliability of the budget output and afraid of formula breaks and unwanted changes. On top of the wish list for the future state, 80% of responders thought that further standardization of activity bid grids would benefit the industry and 60% wished for a “digital, web-based costing tool” that would enable better analytics and reporting, greater reliability, and security.
Have you ever been in front of a Sponsor unable to explain your budget, or challenged that the budget does not make sense?
The lack of technology-enabled solutions to address challenges in the infrastructure side of clinical trials, such as proposal and budget management, is staggering. Most clinical service providers, including top CROs, have made large capital investments in customizing generic solutions that were not purposely designed for costing, or clinical trials. The result is a myriad of unstandardized custom solutions that are not aligned among themselves causing endless mapping issues and training challenges. With the unprecedent rate of mergers and acquisitions in the industry, these custom tools meshed with one another into an amalgam of highly inefficient costing systems, many with no, or basic databases, high failure rate, questionable reliability and accuracy, and poor analytics.
If formula, or rate card errors have caused you costly revisions, or proposal losses, read on…
Reportedly, many industry leaders worry about the number of times the costing tool freezes/crashes due to size or complexity, or produces erroneous results that take tremendous manpower and patience to identify and resolve, causing extended review times, frustration, and Sponsor complaints. After all, proposal budgeting is the “heart and soul” of a clinical service provider and in a competitive environment, who can afford to lose a bid due to a mistake in the budget? Added to these challenges are high turnover rate among proposal staff, difficulty in replacing staff and raising salaries, all contributing to the need to the fundamentally transform clinical costing.
CORE is Designed to Address the Clinical Costing Pain Points
CORE is designed by a unique team composed of experienced clinical outsourcing experts from the biopharma space and veteran budgeting and costing professionals from top CROs, united by a single mission: to bridge the gap between Sponsor and Service Provider costing and achieve greater transparency and efficiency in clinical costing. According to MarketWatch, 88% of Excel spreadsheets contain at least one error…we wanted to reverse the trend by creating a costing platform that is nearly error free, impossible to steal, not vulnerable to intruder break ins. To bring down the high cost of current system maintenance, we wanted to create a true, cloud-based SaaS solution. To the fear that technology is not as flexible as Excel, we designed CORE with a high degree of user independence through flexible settings and formula configuration. To the high investment of customizing generic tools or building new, we answered with a wide variety of solutions, with the out-of-box implementable in as little as 2 weeks. To the industry wide complaint that current tools are hard to learn, we built CORE with a highly intuitive interface that makes adoption a breeze. We answered formula fragility with robust algorithms and configurations.
CORE Features
- Configurable SaaS platform designed for costing clinical services such as clinical study management, data management, biostatistics, pharmacovigilance, medical affairs, regulatory consulting and more.
- Standardized task library and cost drivers, same as Clinical Maestro PORTFOLIO, or the Sponsors’ preferred clinical budgeting platform
- Highly accessible, hosted on secure Microsoft Azure cloud
>99% reduction in formula errors and breakdowns common to Excel-based platforms
>95% reduction in maintenance cost
>90% reduction in effort and time to generate and review bids and bid revisions
Benefits in investing in clinical costing
Built to give you SPEED
- Configurable activity-based costing
- Complex algorithm management
- Multi-rate card management
- Resource allocation and projection
- Fast bid revisions and comparisons
- Analytics-enabled bid database transform bid history into business intelligence
Created to give you COST SAVINGS
- Gross margin analyses
- RACI matrix for activities
- Hybrid (dual responsibility) task costing
- Aligns Operations, Proposals & BD
- Task standardization reduces mapping to sponsor bid grids
Programmed for your ACCURACY
- Inflation and FX Management
- Multi-discount management
- Cost driver management (patient, sites, visits, service assumptions)
- Timing of expense forecast for each bid
EASY ADOPTION, Rapid Deployment
- Secure Microsoft Azure hosting
- Intuitive user interface
- Out-of-the-box configuration in 2 weeks
- Secure and accessible
- Real time dashboards and dynamic visualizations of costs and assumptions
Premium Services
Our team is committed to your success and believe in deploying a comprehensive solution: Software and Services. We will help you develop a fully trained and technology enabled workforce. We will walk beside you from discovery to delivery, ensuring that we meet your expectations.
- Clinical Maestro is pre-configured with Data Trove (Market) tasks and customer rate card
- Customer modifies pre-configured tasks to fit the needs
- Clinical Maestro shell (no tasks pre-loaded)
- Customer self configures own tasks
- Clinical Maestro provides training and support
- Clinical Maestro configures Customer tasks based on requirements
CORE Value Proposition
Industry research reveals that the average time to create a clinical study bid, including revisions exceeds 200 hours and the review adds a minimum 50 hours across multiple functions and stakeholders. If you could reduce 250 hours to 50, what will you do with an extra 200 hours per proposal? The estimated savings for service providers with over 1000 proposals a year translates to 20,000 hours and >$4m in annual savings that goes directly to the bottom line. For smaller CROs and service providers achieving high budgeting speed, efficiency, and accuracy with a state-of-the-art tool, without the heavy capital investment and subsequent maintenance, as well as the need to scale staff proportionally to growth, the return on technology investment translates into more than dollars, but also into sustainable growth and competitive edge.
Adopting new technology, especially in such a critical area as proposal costing, is not a trivial decision and it demands not only deep due diligence, but also clear return on investment. At Strategikon, we wouldn’t have embarked on the journey of transforming clinical trial costing, if we weren’t able to prove the value of the solutions we built. Sponsors who adopted Clinical Maestro PORTFOLIO are reporting >95% accuracy in costing and >x10 increase in the speed to generate a budget. Clinical service providers who are looking at increasing their win rate and gross margin, while differentiating from heavy competition, have even more to gain. The stakes could not be higher.
Align with Sponsor standards.
Differentiate from competitors through accuracy and agility.
Win more business.
The experts at Strategikon developed Clinical Maestro out of a combination of love and frustration. The system was developed and nurtured by financial and clinical business operations executives with both Sponsor and Provider experience. Our founders believed there had to be a better way — and so they created one.
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