Empowered Patient Podcast Aligning Incentives and Leveraging Technology to Improve Clinical Trials for Sponsors and Participants with Meri Beckwith Lindus Health
Meri Beckwith, Co-Founder of Lindus Health, aims to transform clinical trials by changing the CRO model to leverage technology to improve patient recruitment, retention, and the experience of the sponsors and trial participants. While the compensation model for contract research organizations is often not aligned with trial outcomes, Lindus ties compensation to hitting milestones and outcomes. They emphasize the need for more flexible trial design and a decentralized and hybrid approach to reduce participant burden and bring drugs to market sooner.
Meri explains, "This comes back to how contract research organizations are paid and compensated where they’re typically paid per hour of input, and it’s not at all tied to the outputs being speed, patient experience, or quality of data. And so we’ve created this monster over the last 10 or 20 years where the cost of clinical trials keeps going up. Patient experience certainly seems to be getting worse. Above all, patients suffer because the direct experience in clinical trials is worse. Still, they have to wait longer and ultimately pay more for new treatments as the cost of those clinical trials is ultimately passed on to patients."
"So essentially, we’re responsible for running the entire clinical trial end to end, but we do that in a very different way and with a very different business model from that of industry incumbents. On the business model front, we provide completely fixed costs for everything and our customers, the companies developing the drugs, only pay us when we hit milestones. In other words, our compensation is tied to the actual trial outcomes, moving the trial along, et cetera. The second difference is under the hood, we have the same level of concierge service - folks who oversee and design the clinical trials, medics and clinicians who are looking after patients. We also have our technology platform to help us find the right patients, get them enrolled in the right trial quickly, and monitor and capture the data as we go – leading to higher quality data."
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