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What the Title of Home-based Clinical Research Associate Really Means

The title of Clinical Research Associate is deceiving to some degree. Many people think of “associate” as a secondary low paying job. “Clinical Monitor” is a title that better describes what CRA job entails. A clinical research associate does not, in fact, assist anyone; the associate coordinates the smooth progress of a clinical trial. This why there are high-paid senior research associates with many years of experience and freelance clinical research associates who run their own offices, charging up to $120 per hour.

In his interview, Bruce Kriger, CEO of Kriger Research Group International www.kriger.com , leading training institution and clinical research organization said that a question that is often asked about the clinical research associate’s career is why there are so many home-based positions. If a company is so rich that it can afford to run expensive clinical trials, why can’t it afford an office? Generally the reputation of home-based work opportunities is not high. But in this case there is no similarity with ordinary “work-at-home” opportunities.

A Contract Research Organization (sponsor or CRO) usually needs to run multi-center clinical studies, to ensure proper patient recruitment rates. Sometimes it is impossible to find enough patients fitting the inclusion criteria of certain clinical projects within a reasonable time frame.
Now, let’s hypothesize a Phase III multi-center trial that runs in twenty-five different clinical sites. (A clinical site could be a local hospital, clinic, or just a doctor’s office.) And let’s say the company running this hypothetical trial is based in New York, while the centers are randomly distributed throughout the country and abroad.

Now let’s count money. If the company will use New York-based employees to monitor the clinical sites, and requires actual visits to the sites, they will need to pay for accommodations, airfare, per-diem, and travel time. These are usually paid at the same rate as actual work time.

The difference in the cost of employing home-based regional CRA’s and center-based CRA’s can be substantial. The monitoring part of such a clinical trial based on employment of regional CRA’s will cost, lets say $120,000, while the same project based on employment of center-based CRA’s might be as high as $220,000–$320,000. An average successful CRO runs up to twenty-five clinical trials a year, so the difference in our case over the course of a year will be approximately five million dollars. This amount can make a profitable business turn unprofitable, even if the sponsor pays pass-through costs, because a CRO using predominantly center-based CRA’s won’t be able to compete with CRO’s using regional home-based CRA’s.