Financial counterparties

Research investigators are paid by pharmaceutical companies for commercial clinical trials.
The remuneration is intended to boost research with a sufficiently broad scope by allowing clinical researchers, while carrying out their projects, to purchase equipment, supplies or services, to pay for travel, to participate in a congress, seminar, training session, etc.

Regulatory management of financial remuneration

The government has decided to introduce a single standard contract for industrially-promoted biomedical research in public health institutions with the aim of reducing the length of time it takes to sign agreements binding the industrial sponsor of the research to the various hospital stakeholders carrying out the investigation.

This contract is unique in that it associates the industrial sponsor, the health care institution and the investigator for the same research site, but also because it is intended to be deployed in exactly the same way by all health care institutions wishing to participate in the research.

A ministerial circular, published in June 2014 (circular DGOS/PF4/2014/195), enabled implementation of the measure in public health institutions, both through the systematic use of a standard contract template, reducing the number of clauses to be negotiated, and by imposing predefined procedures for drawing up the list and amount of additional costs generated by the research. In January 2016, Article 155 of the Act on the modernisation of our health system changed the terms “single standard contract” and “financial incentives” to “single standard agreement” and “remuneration” respectively.

GIE MEDES is eligible to manage the financial remuneration, as a third-party structure, co-signatory of the standard agreement. The members approved this new activity and incorporated it into the GIE’s articles of association at an extraordinary general meeting on 10 April 2015.

This activity is currently carried out by MEDES for the Toulouse and Nîmes University hospitals.