SCRS Talks
SCRS Talks, hosted by the Society for Clinical Research Sites (SCRS), is a platform for clinical research industry professionals to hear about valuable information shaping the research industry today. These short interviews will provide new perspectives and insights on pressing topics, current events, and the research community.
SCRS Talks
Smarter Reimbursement to Improve Patient Retention
Join Kevin Cooley and Ashley Patil from Scout to explore how innovative technology is transforming the patient reimbursement process in clinical trials. They discuss the most common administrative challenges sites face, and how tools like the Scout Portal are easing the burden on site staff while improving the patient experience. From automated payments and travel coordination to real-time support and multilingual access, this episode highlights the power of combining tech and service. If your site is looking to save time, reduce friction, and improve retention, this conversation is for you.
Welcome to SCRS talks provided by the Society for Clinical Research Sites. Thank you for joining us as we explore the latest insights, trends, and innovations shaping clinical research today. I'm Jimmy Bechtel, the Chief Site Success Officer with SCRS, and I'm joined today by Kevin Cooley, the director of Product Management, and Ashley Patil, the Associate Director, Patient Liaison and Product Engagement, both with Scout. Kevin, Ashley, it's great to have you both here with us. Really excited to talk with you guys today about patient reimbursement and some of the innovations and what we're doing with making that patient engagement and reimbursement process all the better because we know it's constantly a challenge as it comes and pertains to our clinical trials. But before we jump into that, I'd like to start with introductions. And Kevin, I'll start with you, please.
Kevin Cooley:Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Kevin Cooley. I'm the Director of Product Management at Scout. I help lead the strategy and software development for our Scout Clinical web portal. Working with operations development and customers to make it easier for sites and participants to manage travel and payments. I've been with Scout for a little over three years now. I've been a product manager for about seven years and prior to that I was a technical writer for nearly 20 years in various industries. For sponsors and clinical research organizations who need to support participant travel and compensation Scout Clinical is a web portal platform service that makes it easy for sites to manage travel itineraries and payments. Scout Clinical offers the global capability, flexibility, and high level support sites need to retain participants.
Ashley Patil:Yes, thank you Kevin. And my name is Ashley Patil. As Jimmy mentioned, I'm the Associate Director of Patient Liaison and Product Engagement. I worked in the medical space for a little over 15 years now and my most recent role involves me developing, working with our development team, rather to ensure our patients and sites have the best experience using our tools for their trials. And they work with our patient liaison team and they, on a daily basis are interacting with our clinical sites and patients, making it easy for them to participate in the clinical trial.
Jimmy Bechtel:Wonderful. Well, thank you and thank you both for being here. I'm really excited to dive into this topic. It's one that is of constant discussion and of need of a lot of innovation and development here. Start us off Kevin or Ashley, whoever wants to jump on this one first. What common administrative challenges. Do site staff face with patient reimbursements? What kinds of things are you guys hearing and addressing and using your technology to try to solve at the site level?
Ashley Patil:I can take this one first. What's great about using Scout is that all of the tools for the sites and the patients really, it's all located in one place in our portal. The sites aren't having to fill out numerous forms. They're not having to manually process patient reimbursements. We, do that. Scout does that. The reimbursement and the travel coordination is really accessible and easy for the sites. The patients can even submit their own travel and reimbursement requests directly through the portal as well. We make it nice and easy for everyone involved to participate. And like I said, we have a lot of those tools and Kevin may be able to speak to some of those tools more easily.
Kevin Cooley:Absolutely. Our site staff can log in anytime to monitor and approve requests. They're not stuck doing the data entry. We are constantly thinking about ways to further leverage technology solutions to help solve some of their challenges. One of the things we've been doing is integrating single side on. To make it easier to access our web portal, we've recently integrated with One Home and Firecrest. Site staff can log into one system and easily transition over to the Scout Clinical web portal.
Jimmy Bechtel:And that's really what it's all about, right, guys, is ease of use and taking the burden off of the site. Ashley, you started us off with talking about the reimbursement process and the travel. The travel reimbursement and getting. Patients paid for the work and time and energy that they need to do. And we hear all the time the sentiment is that the site coordinators aren't travel agents, they're not there. Mm-hmm. To try to figure out how to coordinate travel and, and shouldn't have to be burdened with any excess work as it pertains to finding reimbursement for that travel. So it's great to hear that that's a major focus of some of the technology solutions that you guys employ there. And I know a lot of sites prefer to minimize their involvement in handling those payments as we're talking about here. What are some of the considerations sites weigh when deciding whether to manage those logistics in-house or to use a partner like Scout and speaking a little bit expanding on the point that we just made here?
Kevin Cooley:Absolutely. Scout supports a wide range of payment methods. We support checks, bank transfers onsite debit cards relatable debit cards even PayPal too.. Patients can set their preferred payment preference and their patient profile, and then when they go to submit payments, that payment preference is automatically pulled in for their request. We've also found that it's really easy for the site to order onsite debit cards a few weeks in advance of their first patient so that they're ready for patient distribution.
Ashley Patil:Yes. As Kevin mentioned, the payments are really fast. They're secure, and because we have so many options, it's tailored to the participant's preference which then helps retain participant or patient participation in the actual clinical trial. The sites don't have to get involved with issuing the payment Scout handles it. The only responsibility that the site would have is that they actually enter that reimbursement request, but then Scout takes it from there.
Kevin Cooley:We even handle automatic tax withholding and help with the year end IIRS filings.
Jimmy Bechtel:Mm-hmm. That's excellent. Topic for another time, right? Mm-hmm. We know that that's a burden overall for the industry, but it's great to hear that there's a solution in place that helps manage some of that. It's great to hear that your focus is on these kinds of services and tools. How to eliminate or reduce that burden that is placed on the sites, because again, they're not travel agents, they're not accountants, they're not really in the business. These coordinators who end up doing this work are not really in the business of having to do that. You either have to bring in a team or an individual FTEs to be able to manage this work in a lot of cases, depending on trial volume or adopt a specialized service like Scout to help manage that. It's great to hear that there's so many advantages and platforms and opportunities and services out there to help them manage that. Staying on top of those reimbursement approvals among other time sensitive task obviously is a challenge for busy research teams. That's part of the reason why we're having this conversation today. Can you talk about some of the tools and reminders that you've seen make some of the biggest difference in keeping processes like this on track and making sure that arguably one of the most important pieces of this is that reimbursement for the patients and that appreciation, that small monetary action that we can take on the clinical trials for those patients.
Ashley Patil:Yes. As far as tools and reminders and just enabling the sites to do what they need to do. We have reimbursement and travel list views throughout the entire portal so that they are not left guessing what to do next. They have that visibility as to the status of the reimbursement and the status of the coordinated travel. We also send out email prompts when an action was initiated or if an action is needed, such as approving a patient request or potentially reviewing a payment. We're really working hand in hand either systematically or with our actual patient liaison team interacting with the sites and the patients to make sure that it's easy. Like I said, that's our whole goal. We even have the option to send text messaging reminders to the patients. We're really full circle, comprehensive, doing everything that we can and always looking to make it as easy as possible.
Kevin Cooley:Agreed. We even have the ability, if sites have fixed payments for stipends, we can work with them to configure the system to control that payment submission. When those payments are submitted, they're automatically approved and can be quickly processed. We have a document center where the site staff can view study specific documents such as parameters and training materials. They don't have to constantly check the portal or memorize workflows. There's a work learning center that has video walkthroughs and tutorial documents, and we're constantly looking at our interface and our workflows. To make sure that we enhance it so that it's intuitive and guides users throughout the system. And additionally, our patient liaison team is always available 24/ 7 365 for the sites to reach out for assistance.
Jimmy Bechtel:Thanks Kevin. Thanks Ashley. And what I really took away from that is that support aspect of it, the backend support I think is so important because we hear so much from sites that they don't have the support and when they are provided tools or they are provided resources, they don't have what they need when things are challenging or there's technical issues, or they don't know how to access or use a particular aspect of that system. Ease of use is one of the things that I heard and being able to very quickly and simply get in and do what needs to be done to manage that reimbursement. But also then as you had mentioned specifically Kevin, the support is there for them should they need it when it comes to this process that they're just not experts in. Being able to help them through that is a really valuable thing. Thank you guys for sharing that. Site teams really often, as we all know, work across a lot of different locations, and we talk about different shifts and sometimes we're talking 24 hours here, especially in the wake of phase one clinical trials. But from your perspectives, what's the features, most important in a reimbursement platform to support that level of flexibility and access and enable multi-locations and multi shifts in different departments and all the different ways in which we can structure a clinical research site.
Kevin Cooley:The Scout Clinical Web web platform is a mobile friendly browser solution that allows the users, they can log into the system from anywhere, from any device, computer, tablet, smart device and make those payments, track those payments. Our web platform has a translation feature into over 200 languages. We support multiple currencies and we're fully hipaa, GDPR, SOC two type two compliant. We're able to store participant data in their regions and provide top level security for that data.
Ashley Patil:Yes, and I'll just add that the patient liaison team works in the portal, just as the sites do and help them real in real time. And that's what really sets us apart. We have the technological capabilities, but we also have that service component where we are supporting the sites, we are supporting the patients and we actually care. We want to make it easy. We want to make sure it's right. And we wanna make sure that the patient has the best experience that they can and gets what they need to get out of the clinical trial by using our service.
Jimmy Bechtel:Well, that's excellent. I think that focus and that mentality is made apparent through some of, not only your answer here, but some of the other aspects of the technology and the service that you guys talk about. It's great to see a potential solution a comprehensive solution that might solve a lot of the challenges. Should this not be something that that site has particular expertise in or just wants to supplement and speed and relief burden around this very important yet sometimes very challenging aspect of conducting clinical trials. So thank you all for sharing about what you guys are doing and what platforms and services like this can bring and how they can enhance the clinical trial delivery process. Kevin and Ashley, thank you so much for your time today.
Ashley Patil:Yes, thank you for having us. It was a pleasure.
Kevin Cooley:Absolutely. Thank you.
Jimmy Bechtel:And for those that are listening I want to make sure to bring your attention to other site focused resources made available on our website, my scrs.org. Like other publications, other SCRS talks, episodes, as well as our site solutions summits that take place across the duration of a year. Thank you for listening, tuning in, and until next time.
