Skyelarke makes public significant changes to SkyePay

Skyelarke, the health technology company specialising in making clinical research accessible, has announced alterations to its patient payment technology SkyePay.

The SkyePay technology was built by and for the clinical research industry. The company has launched faster payments via bank transfer, virtual cards and PayPal/Venmo integration on top of the physical card option, offering patients an excellent selection in how they receive expense or stipend payments.

In addition to increased patient payment choice, SkyePay has also developed an application programming interface framework, allowing interactive response technology, electronic data capture or electronic patient-reported outcomes integration to streamline the patients’ payment process and reduce the burden on sites.

“Building on our launch in March, we’re thrilled to be furthering our mission by announcing these important enhancements to SkyePay, which will launch later in 2023,” said Phil Staines, chief strategy officer of Skyelarke.

“We believe we can only improve patient experiences if we start to eradicate obstacles that are put in their way. Unnecessary financial hardship, time-consuming processes, and geographical barriers need to be optimised to ensure the patient can participate without burden. Offering a greater number of payment method choices, whilst making our platform accessible to other Clinical Trial Systems, is a step towards this.”

There is a call for better pay for clinical trial participants, with experts saying that while money should not be an incentive for patients to participate in clinical trials, it is important to recognise that patients are a finite resource that drives clinical trials forward. If they exist, the pay and reimbursement often do not match the patient burden.

With approximately 30% of participants dropping out of clinical trials, patients being paid for their time and effort will likely to lead to better participant recruitment and retention. It costs around $6,533 to recruit one patient for a clinical trial. The cost to recruit a new patient if one is lost due to drop-out is $19,533.