Why Vault Payments?
Ease of configuration
Set up quickly and embedded within Vault CTMS
Flexibility
Accommodate different payment triggers across various therapeutic areas
User experience
Easily navigate with minimal trainingRapid growth made payment process modernization essential for Ora, a full-service global contract research organization (CRO) specializing in ophthalmology.
As Ora conducted more complex Phase III studies and expanded globally to 25 countries, the number of sites increased significantly. The company needed to manage a higher volume of global clinical research site payments in multiple currencies, which pushed the limits of its manual and paper-based processes. Ora turned to Vault Payments to automate and streamline its payment operations.
Limitations of Paper
At the time, Ora’s payments process was entirely paper-based and managed in Microsoft Excel trackers. “It was resource-intensive and time-consuming to determine payment schedules, and site inquires about payment status required a lot of back and forth between clinical study and finance teams,” says Edward Leftin, director of information systems at Ora.
At Ora, there are several payment triggers – visits, a combination of visits and procedures, and specific clinical study milestones. To encourage early user adoption, the company opted for a less complex approach to implementation, configuring basic functionality and adding new capabilities as they become available in Vault Payments.
Implementation Best Practices
| Recruit a diverse implementation team | Before diving into implementation, assemble a cross-functional team and choose representatives from each therapeutic area – clinical trial assistants, project managers, and finance staff. They’ll be your champions when you launch. |
| Streamline and optimize processes before you configure | Invest time to standardize processes where applicable to gain efficiencies downstream. Simply moving a man |
| Focus on user adoption and what users need | Leverage the expertise of those managing day-to-day operations as you configure your system. If the new system’s functionality doesn’t meet their needs, they won’t give up their Excel trackers and you’ll end up with teams doing work in two places. |
| Prioritize training | Switching to a new platform can be daunting, especially for people who have been performing processes the same way for years. Put the right training in place before go-live with up-to-date documents and standard operating procedures to ease the transition to a new system and ways of working. |
Vault Dashboards and Reports Surface Data in One Place
Several months after going live with Vault Payments, Ora managed more than $1 million in site payments more quickly and easily than in the past. Using real-time reports and dashboards that centralize data from Vault EDC, Vault CTMS, and Vault Payments, the Ora team no longer needs to search for information from different sources and build pivot tables in Excel to process payments.
Ora’s team currently uses multiple Vault Payments features, from site and study budgets to overhead and holdbacks. They can now streamline payments and set fees, reimbursement rates, payment thresholds, advances, and reimbursement limits for each site. The team has also created two new workflows to alert team members about upcoming payments, including one that identifies payable items before approval. “With Vault Payments, we’ve been able to meet requests from clinical operations teams to build reports that support how they analyze data. With easily accessible data, we’re creating tools that support their workflows,” explains Leftin.
Benefits of Streamlined Payments
Recently, Ora generated payment letters across three studies and found they were accurate, with very few discrepancies between sites. Because sites can see what they’ve been paid for in one comprehensive payment letter, the amount of back and forth communication with Ora’s payment department has decreased significantly. In addition, Ora’s finance team no longer has to wait for multiple workflow steps to be completed before disbursement because the entire process has been automated. Payment requests are routed for review, approved directly in Vault by clinical project managers, with updates sent automatically to finance.
“Because our clinical staff was involved from the beginning, they adopted Vault Payments quickly, so we’ve seen immediate value from the system.” Edward Leftin, director of information systems at Ora
As Ora continues to grow and run more global studies, the company is confident that Vault Payments will keep pace. “Expanding our usage of Vault Clinical Operations Suite to Vault Payments has improved our payments workflow and strengthened our relationships with clinical sites,” says Leftin.
Learn more about how Ora uses Vault Clinical Operations Suite to accelerate trial execution.
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