A Balanced Scorecard

I am Dr. Jeff Kingsley and this is another edition of Riding in Cars With Researchers! Today we are continuing a series where we will talk about study site metrics. Specifically a balanced scorecard. A quick recap of what we discussed in prior episodes – a balanced scorecard is the sweet spot of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). A site’s customers need something from you and I argue that they need EQTCS – Enrollment, Quality, Timelines, and Customer Service. Your balanced scorecard is the balancing point of the health of your research site with servicing the needs of your customers. I would argue that EQTCS needs to be in any site’s balanced scorecard.

Timelines

In the last episode, we discussed quality or the Q in EQTCS. Today we are going to talk about timelines. Our customers need us to move rapidly on everything. Our customers want us to be able to make rapid decisions on feasibility questionnaires, rapidly start-up a study, rapidly enroll the first patient in that study, quickly do query resolution, database lock. Our customers want responsiveness. Now, why do they want it? Just because it’s nice to have someone who is responsive to you? Sure it is, but it’s actually deeper than that. If you invent the cure for cancer today, you file your patent today. And your patent has a finite lifetime. You don’t wait until you actually know you discovered the cure for cancer before you file your patent. You filed your patent before you knew it was the cure for cancer. And that patent clock is ticking. It takes way too long to get through the R&D pipeline. It takes 15-20 years to complete research and submit that data to FDA for approval. And that length of time is eating away at patent life. That is one of the leading causes of why drugs cost what they do when they get their FDA approval. The owners of those compounds have to make back a massive investment before they even begin to turn a profit on all of those years of work. So they care about timelines – the faster you can move, the longer they have patent life, the cheaper they would come to market. I’ll say it again as many people don’t realize that sponsors don’t want to come to market at an expensive price. Trust me, they really don’t! If they come to market at an expensive price, they struggle more to get physicians to write for their medicine. Or if the physicians do write the prescription, there is a higher likelihood that insurance companies would deny payment, and won’t allow those patients to be on those drugs. It’s harder to get on formulary. So, the higher the price, the less they actually gain utilization of that drug in healthcare. If they can come to market more cheaply, more physicians would write for it, more patients would have it paid for, more insurance companies would allow it on formulary. So actually, if we can do R&D faster, drug prices will come down. It’s amazing and would be a wonderful thing. So think about it, if we could work faster, we serve our customers better, we speed innovation, we get new drugs to the patients that need them faster, and we reduce the cost of drugs when they get to market. All of that by moving more quickly.