Budget Negotiation

The experienced resources at CFS recognize that each investigator site is a research partner of your organization. We recognize the importance of building a strong relationship with your sites and understand how to build the report required to have a successful negotiation. There are two key services provided to our clients in the area of budget negotiation --- the development of the investigator budget and the negotiation of the budget amounts and payment terms.

Investigator Budget Development

We believe that the success of a budget negotiation actually starts with the development of a fair investigator grant budget and payment schedule. Most sponsor companies rely on their own limited investigator grant data when developing a budget. While this approach provides a realistic view of what the sponsor has historically paid, it does not provide an industry-wide cost perspective which provides a better representation of procedure costs. CFS has access to the leading cost benchmarking databases in the industry as well as a robust, proprietary internal database of procedure costs. Our Contract Management Services staff will work with your clinical team to develop a realistic investigator grant budget that is supported with current industry data.

Investigator Budget Negotiation

We recognize that some organizations have a decentralized investigator contracting process where the budget and contract negotiation responsibilities are divided among 2 or more departments. In those cases where only the investigator budget responsibilities are being outsourced to CFS, we will work in close partnership with your contract group to help ensure a seamless and integrated negotiation process with the investigator sites. To help you derive the most value from this service, we will develop budget parameters that establish the negotiation thresholds for each key budget item. The CFS project team works diligently to negotiate budgets within the threshold and will partner with you when requests are made that fall well outside of the pre-established parameters. Your clinical teams need to be focused on the other crucial study initiation activities, so CFS uses a wide array of data and negotiation techniques to minimize the number of budget requests that require your input.