Drive Clinical Trial Success with a Better Participant Payment Experience

How and when participants are paid for taking part in a clinical trial can impact their satisfaction, engagement, and retention, all of which can impact a study’s success. This is driving sites and sponsors to consider how they can create better experiences for participants.

An efficient payment process helps offset the financial stress participants experience when taking part in a trial. Just offering compensation isn’t enough.

Delayed or inaccurate payments, limited payment options and a lack of visibility into payment status all can frustrate participants, erode trust and lead directly to disengagement. Additionally, processing payments and responding to payment-related questions is a burden for site staff who are already overextended.

A more streamlined and automated payment approach can improve experiences on both sides by delivering faster, more accurate payments to participants while easing workloads for site staff.

Shifting away from site-driven payments

Improving the participant payment experience requires rethinking processes that many sponsors and sites use today. Traditional payment processes are manual and fragmented.

Site staff document visits, calculate stipends and process payments, often across multiple systems. These tasks are time consuming and prone to error. And when mistakes happen, they affect not only participant satisfaction but also study budgets.

Sites typically offer limited payment options, such as cash or gift cards. Those options may work for some participants but rarely match everyone’s payment preferences.

They can also introduce tracking and compliance challenges. What’s more, the burden doesn’t end once payments are issued.

Site staff need to field and investigate participant questions about payment statuses or amounts because participants can’t track what’s happening with their payments. A better payment approach that uses patient-centered technology and removes burdens for site staff can alleviate these challenges and create better, more consistent experiences for study participants.

The patient-driven approach

Participant payment technology has evolved to automate much of the payment lifecycle. A modern platform can pull visit data directly from an electronic data capture system or another source system.

Next, it uses that data to automatically calculate stipends and sends that information to a payment engine. It then notifies participants of their upcoming stipend and distributes the stipend at the point of payout.

This approach delivers an experience that better reflects what participants want:

• Timely and accurate payments: Participants can be paid in days—or even minutes—rather than weeks or months. And those payments aren’t just fast, they’re accurate.
• Transparency: Instead of calling sites to ask about the status of payments, participants can simply check a mobile app to see what they’ve been paid, what’s pending and why. And if they do have questions, they can be instructed to contact the payment service, not site staff.
• More choices: Participants no longer need to be frustrated by limited payment options. With modern payment technology, they can use the app to choose their preferred payment method, such as a direct deposit into their bank account, a virtual card, or digital wallet deposit.

These benefits extend globally as well, with some payment technologies designed to run transactions in more than 180 countries. This allows study participants around the world to receive fast, accurate payments in their local currency and in accordance with local regulatory requirements.

Unlocking new possibilities with payments

In addition to improving payment speed, accuracy, and transparency, modern payment technology is creating new opportunities to further improve the trial experience. For example, AI is being used to simplify payment-related tasks, such as processing out-of-pocket expenses.

A participant can take a photo of their receipt, and AI will extract relevant information from the photo and use it to prepopulate their reimbursement claim. This reduces work and the potential for errors for participants.

Payment technology is also becoming more integrated with other clinical trial technologies, such as electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA) tools. This is enabling sponsors to add micropayments to their reimbursement strategy without any additional burdens for sites.

These small, timely payments can be automatically triggered by specific actions, such as when participants complete eDiaries. Micropayments are already proving to be a practical engagement tool that can encourage participants to comply with study requirements.

One large pharma company has distributed thousands of micropayments across three clinical trials using automated payment technology that is integrated with eCOA products. This has helped the company boost eDiary compliance rate by more than 15% compared to trials that don’t offer micropayments.

Motivating participants for trial success

Modern payment technology enables faster and more accurate payments delivered in the methods that participants want and with reduced potential for mistakes. This can create more satisfied and trusting participants and ultimately help them contribute to smoother, more successful clinical trials.

About the Authors

Taylor Harris is an Associate Director of Participant Payments at IQVIA with extensive experience supporting global clinical trials. In this role, Taylor oversees participant payment strategy and execution across diverse regulatory environments, partnering with sponsors and sites to ensure compliant, efficient, and participant-focused payment solutions. Their work centers on operational scalability, transparency, and improving the participant experience in clinical research.

Shaun Williams is currently Senior Director, IQVIA Participant Payments, at IQVIA. Prior to this, Mr. Williams was Vice President, Investigator Management Solutions at Syneos Health. Mr. Williams also worked with Clinverse Inc. (now Sitero), Health Decisions, Inc. (now Premier Research), Talecris Plasma Resources (now Grifols) and was also previously a partner at ThinSpring. Mr. Williams started his career with Baxter Healthcare in various operations and quality roles throughout the world. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP). Mr. Williams has over 30 years of experience in the Life Sciences industry, with insight into the challenges faces by Sponsors, CRO’s, Patients, and Vendors in improving research processes, to include regulatory affairs, operational improvements, and financial management.