ideasIdea

Publish per-patient trial cost benchmarks and target halving them

Nobody knows what a cancer trial should cost because budgets are secret. Publishing anonymised cost per patient by trial type would expose waste and let funders set targets.

Sponsors and sites contribute anonymised per-patient cost data by phase, design and procedure to an independent benchmark (as hospitals do for procedure costs), broken down into drug, monitoring, imaging, data management and site payments. Funders set cost-per-patient targets for public trials and require justification above the benchmark.

Hypothesis

Transparency plus targets will reduce the median cost per patient of publicly funded phase 3 oncology trials by a third within five years without loss of data quality.

Rationale

Cost varies severalfold for similar trials; most of the excess is monitoring, imaging frequency and site overhead that add no information. Benchmarking drove cost convergence in construction and hospital procedures.

What would test it

Pilot the benchmark across two cooperative groups and one sponsor; compare cost dispersion and median cost before and after publication.

Maturity

speculative

Who has to act

policy

Cost to try

Small (under $1M)

Years to first evidence

Bottlenecks it attacks

Trial design, endpoints and cost · A phase 3 trial takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars, and often answers a question that has already moved on.
Funding follows fashion, not burden · Money goes to the cancers and questions that are easy or popular, not the ones that kill most or where a dollar would do most.

Connected

4top

Pages like this

not linked directly; found by shared links

institutions

Cancer Research UK National Cancer Institute (NIH)

bottlenecks

Funding follows fashion, not burden Trial design, endpoints and cost