Bioclinica buys Clinverse citing pharma demand for trial payment efficiency
Buying Research Triangle Park (RTP) Durham, North Carolina-based Clinverse – financial terms of which were not provided – has added a portfolio of automated clinical trial payment services to Bioclinica’s eHealthSolutions business.
The payment firm’s previous investors include Hatteras Venture Partners of Durham and New Jersey-based Edison Partners, which led by a $9.1m (€6.9m) round in August 2014.
Clinverse’s approach is to automatically track tax and exchange rate changes and automate payments to clinical trial sites and study participants.
The firm partnered with OmniComm Systems in 2013 to combine its Clinpay automated payment tool with the latter’s electronic data capture (EDC) offering.
Bioclinica has not said whether this partnership will be maintained post-acquisition.
The takeover continues the strategy Bioclinica enacted recent years.
In 2014, Bioclinica bought Blueprint Clinical, a tech firm whose software helps drugmakers develop risk-based monitoring plans.
A year later it acquired retention services firm MediciGroup and in September it bought pharmacovigilance and regulatory tech firm Synowledge.
Automated payment
In 2013, the US Government introduced the Sunshine Act in a bid to make financial interactions during the drug development process more transparent.
Since August of that year, drug companies and their contractors have been required to record all details of all the financial interactions they make, including payments to study investigators.
The need to collect and store this information in an efficient manner fuelled the growth of tech companies with Clinverse and peers like Greenphire and CFS competing for control of the increasingly lucrative market.
Bioclinica’s acquisition of Clinverse leaves Greephire as the last of these three firms to be independent. CFS was bought by DrugDev in October 2013.
