Clinverse, a Durham, N.C.-based provider of automated financial management technology solutions for clinical trials, has expanded its suite of products with the addition of ClinPlan, purpose-built software for clinical trial budget management and forecasting.

“Changes in the clinical trial environment today, such as complex study designs and an increasing need to use outsourced vendors, have resulted in significant challenges for effective financial management of trial budgets and forecasting,” said Denis Connaghan, Clinverse CEO. “But for more than 70% of companies, the primary tool continues to be Microsoft Excel. These spreadsheets already are difficult to share and consolidate with other financial forecasting and budgeting data, don’t help forecast subject and site activation, take too long to update and are prone to error. With ClinPlan, our clients can automate the process of developing a full forecasted expense picture on a routine basis and set the stage for decreasing the variance in expected funds requests.”

ClinPlan provides clients with the ability to consolidate budgets from the variety of vendors and sources that contribute to the total trial expense. The solution also imports site activation data and schedule of assessments and related expenses to allow the cost over time to be evaluated and reevaluated using actual data once the trial begins. The result is better cash management as sponsors and CROs can assess trial expense needs based on site and subject enrollment to understand when trial expenses will be incurred over time due the myriad of changes and proactively plan for funds necessary to support the ongoing expense needs of the trial.

Key features of ClinPlan include the ability to:
• Define expense categories or use established defaults for expense, activity and task.
• Assign activities to phase, such as startup, ongoing or closeout.
• Define geographic regions and the number or percentage of activated sites for each.
• Define different costs for different regions/countries and subject or non-subject costs.
• Forecast sites, subjects and enrollment over time.
• Reforecast study expenses based on actuals. Identify delays and quickly determine the project expense effects.
• Use modeling capabilities for what-if scenarios including adding a region or country to assess financial impact.
• Modify base dates and reforecast all expenses.
• Export plans to Excel for analysis.

CROs receive an accurate picture of future expense needs based on trial performance in order to make more accurate fund requests from sponsors, while sponsors receive an accurate reflection of when total budget expenses will occur in future months, quarters and years.

“ClinPlan is the first of three new products we have coming down the pipeline this year,” said Connaghan. “We work hard to stay in front of what’s happening in the industry and provide best-in-class solutions for every financial aspect of a clinical trial to set our clients up for success. Not only do our solutions improve time, cost and resource efficiencies, but they also provide sponsors and CROs a higher level of confidence as they move forward with the next phase of their clinical trial.”