Medidata, a New York-based global provider of cloud-based solutions for clinical research, has announced the latest release of the Medidata Clinical Cloud and the immediate availability of new capabilities and enhancements that broaden the company’s platform of advanced technologies and data analytics. The new features are designed to optimize clinical trial processes and enhance sponsor-site relationships.

Among the key enhancements is further simplified and centralized user administration throughout the technology platform. Now, an administrator can manage a comprehensive range of user roles across the entire Medidata suite of solutions (including Rave, Balance, Grants Manager, Coder and Patient Cloud), increasing the speed of study start-up and enhancing the productivity of trial sites.

Encompassing trial design, budgeting, contracting and site payment, Medidata CTMS offers an automated, end-to-end solution that increases the accuracy and timeliness of payments to clinical trial sites. In addition to automatically triggering payments based on patient visits recorded in Rave, Medidata CTMS now includes the capabilities to pay clinical trial sites for specific, completed procedures.

The enhancements are designed to help life sciences companies accurately calculate site payments by automatically subtracting the costs of incomplete procedures, thus eliminating manual administration. This automation allows life sciences companies to greatly reduce the overhead traditionally required to perform manual workarounds. The enhancements facilitate more effective management of budget amendments and renegotiations, ensuring payments to sites reflect the most current negotiated costs.

“On average, investigators are reimbursed more than three months after a milestone completion and, as a result, the financial burden of participating in clinical research becomes too high for investigators,” said Michelle Marlborough, Medidata’s vice president of product strategy. “With the end-to-end payment capability built into our platform, sponsors can enhance site satisfaction by paying investigators on time, increasing the likelihood that they’ll participate in future studies.”

As part of the company’s efforts to modernize and streamline the way clinical trials are conducted and monitored worldwide, Medidata has enriched its platform’s capabilities to give sponsors easier and more intuitive access to information on enrollment, milestone tracking, key performance indicators, trial activity and subject enrollment. Also, trial managers now can configure visit letters to meet the needs of any study, without engineering or technical expertise. These visit letters and other monitoring documents seamlessly flow into Veeva’s electronic trial master file portal Vault eTMF—via an integration with the Medidata Clinical Cloud—ensuring submission readiness in real time.