Speaker 1: Hey everybody, welcome back to theclinicaltrialsguru.com, again it's theclinicaltrialsguru.com. Today I want to talk about contracts and budgets. And so I've been noticing a lot, and I mean we do contracting and budget negotiations for all the sites that we own and operate, which are about eight, and then all the sites that we do consulting for, that are clients of ours, which at any given time could be one or several dozen, okay, at the moment it's around 12. So we negotiate contracts all the time. My point is I've been seeing lots and lots this year of budgets that are sent to us from the sponsor, where rather than breaking down every visit into its individual assessments and then having a price associated with that assessment, they're just sending you visits without the assessments and then a total reimbursement for that visit. So they're making you do extra work, I don't know if it's intentional or what the reasons are, maybe it has something to do with the Sunshine Act, although the Sunshine Act was enacted I believe in 2012, so I don't know why they're doing it now in 2016, but the point is you have to do more work now, you as a site, when you negotiate budgets, if you don't want to get ripped off, right? So if you truly want to get what's fair and reasonable for your assessments, you're going to have to look at the protocol, you're going to have to look, break down each visit into its individual components and their individual assessments for those visits, and then hopefully you have a database from past trials that you've done, this is what we do, where we know that a physical exam is $90 and a PANS for a site rating scale is like $150, this and that. If you do that, you will see that when you break down each visit into its components and then itemize each assessment, you're going to be needing a lot more money than what the sponsor is offering you when there are no assessments and it's just the visit and then the reimbursement. So be careful for that, that's the hard way to do it, that's the right way to do it, you can justify your reimbursement request this way. There's also an easy way to do it, right? Just take the budget they give you and then increase it by 75%, there's going to be some back and forth, they might ask for justification, they might say, well the most we can do is 50, then you're going to come back and say, well if you do want me to break down this protocol into its assessments, you're going to see that this is actually what we're accustomed to getting, and so you're going to end up somewhere around 50%. So definitely negotiate, don't stop negotiating budgets, I know way too many sites that don't even negotiate their budgets, they just accept what the sponsor gives them. But a lot of the sites that do negotiate, if you're not careful and you don't break down those visits into their individual assessments, you're actually going to be leaving a lot of money on the table, and I think it's all supply and demand. I think right now you have a healthy demand of sites for studies, because the supply is relatively low compared to the demand, which is big, from the sites. But when those roles flip, and there's a huge supply of studies on the market, meaning many studies, you're going to have sponsors that are basically going to be asking sites to do trials for them, and they're going to give them incentives to do the trials. Right now we're not seeing that in 2016, we're actually seeing sites having to compete to get studies, but pretty soon, and the market has cycles, it's just like real estate, there's supply and demand, basic supply and demand dynamics. When there's a high supply of studies, sites have the leverage, when there's a lower supply of studies, sponsors have the leverage, and we happen to be in the period of time right now where the sponsors have some of the leverage. Some of that leverage is decreasing, it's going away compared to this time last year in 2015, and we'll see what the case is going to be this time next year, 2017. So always be aware of the market, supply and demand dynamics, but most importantly, and what you can actually take home from this video and implement at your site today, is negotiate, negotiate these budgets, break down each visit into its assessments, and negotiate it that way, so you don't leave money on the table, alright? Thank you guys for watching, let me know if you need help with any of this stuff, I'll be more than happy to have a consulting call with you guys, and see if I can help you out at all, alright? Dan from TheClinicalTrialsGuru.com, take care.