Regional hospitals in the U.S. are banding together to attract more lucrative drug trials to their facilities, according to Bloomberg.
Drugmakers are consistently searching for clinical trial participants and many pharma companies pay hospitals big bucks to test their medicines, sometimes at more than $10,000 per patient.
By operating as a single consortium, smaller regional hospitals are hoping to keep pace with larger academic medical centers, which tend to host a lot of active clinical trials thanks to their larger patient bases and renowned staff.
In April, Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger and five other local health systems formed a consortium to increase participation in drug trials, while a group of rural hospitals in North Dakota recently ramped up its partnerships in the hopes of expanding trial accessibility.
"As a group we're stronger than just one," James Brazeal, Geisinger chief administrative research officer, told Bloomberg. "We're able to leverage that so we have more of an ability to participate, so that we can attract some of the trials that we couldn't attract before."
The new strategy is also beneficial for drugmakers, which say hosting clinical trials across several hospitals is cheaper and more efficient because they face fewer regulatory review boards, according to Bloomberg.