IQVIA 高管：申办方如何借助 AI 与历史合同加速合同及预算谈判

Instead of approaching every study as a new negotiation, sponsors can use technology to leverage what they’ve previously learned about sites and work more efficiently.

November 2, 2026

IQVIA executives, Rajesh Patel and Vikas Basal, both senior directors of product management for the clinical trial financial suite, say that AI and previous contracts can help speed up new agreements.

Contracting and budget negotiations are persistent bottlenecks in study startups for sponsors. Today, negotiations take more than 100 days on average, while two-thirds of clinical trial sites report frequent contract and budget delays. These delays not only slow contracting, but they can also delay site activation, push back enrollment milestones and create downstream pressure on overall study timelines. But now, sponsors have an opportunity to rethink how they manage these activities.

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Instead of approaching every study as a new negotiation, sponsors can use technology to leverage what they’ve previously learned about sites and work more efficiently.

This doesn’t mean contracting will become effortless. Negotiations will always require compromise and back-and-forth communication between sponsors and sites. But by using connected data and artificial intelligence (AI), sponsors can reduce repetitive administrative work and apply insights from previous studies to inform future negotiations.

Breaking a repetitive cycle

Negotiations can be slow going as sponsors and sites work to agree to terms. But too often, they’re negotiating issues they’ve already resolved.

Sponsors may work with hundreds of sites, many of them repeatedly across multiple trials. Yet contracting and budget negotiations often start from scratch each time. Previous agreements and negotiated language aren’t easily reused, forcing sponsors to revisit decisions they’ve already made.

As a result, sponsors aren’t only repeating work across studies; they’re recreating knowledge.

A key reason this cycle persists is that contracting remains fragmented and highly manual. Budgets are created in one system, contracts in another, while negotiations unfold over email chains and in redlined documents. Each handoff requires duplicate data entry, manual review and document reconciliation. This slows negotiations and makes it difficult to carry knowledge from one study to the next.

Connected technology ecosystems can change this dynamic. By unifying the financial-management technologies that sponsors use into one ecosystem, budgeting, contracting and other financial activities and their data can be linked in one end-to-end workflow. This can help sponsors reduce repetitive work, preserve knowledge and accelerate negotiations.

In practice, this means linking budgeting, contracting, amendments, approvals and payments through shared data so decisions made in one part of the process are visible and usable in the next.

A better way forward

A connected technology ecosystem doesn’t force sites to change how they work. They can still negotiate and send contracts over email — a process that most sites prefer compared to logging into a mix of different systems or web portals for every sponsor they work with.

What a connected ecosystem does change is how sponsors manage contracting and budget negotiations, allowing them to work more efficiently and make better-informed decisions. Three improvements in particular stand out:

Building on previous negotiations

Each completed negotiation creates valuable institutional knowledge, such as accepted contract language, negotiated budget terms and site preferences. But because this knowledge is trapped in emails, documents and disconnected systems, it too often isn’t reused. It simply disappears at the end of each study.

When contracting and negotiations are not isolated activities but instead connected within a larger financial ecosystem, this knowledge can be preserved and reused. It can inform the first drafts of contracts, so they reflect what a site has already negotiated and approved. This can reduce negotiations and allow both sponsors and sites to spend less time revisiting familiar issues. It also benefits sites by shortening turnaround time and lowering the administrative burden of resolving familiar contract and budget issues for each new study.

Now, each completed negotiation becomes an opportunity to make the next one faster.

Shifting from doing to reviewing

Human expertise and judgement are central to contracting, and they always will be. Finance, legal and research teams negotiate terms, evaluate risk and address the needs of different study stakeholders. By incorporating AI into the contracting process, teams can spend more time applying their expertise where it’s needed most. Instead of requiring teams to manually examine lengthy contracts line by line, AI can compare them against previous agreements and predefined negotiation parameters. It can also identify meaningful changes and flag terms that fall outside acceptable thresholds. This reduces the effort required to address routine edits and instead allows teams to focus on higher-value tasks that actually require human judgement.

AI’s greatest value is in helping teams identify what needs attention faster, apply consistent parameters and focus expert review on the areas that carry the most risk or impact.

Connecting contracting to other financial workflows

Contract negotiations may end when an agreement is signed, but the negotiated terms will shape downstream financial activities, including startup payments and ongoing site payments. When contracting is disconnected from the systems used for these activities, information often must be manually transferred between them. This creates duplicate work and the potential for mistakes.

In a connected ecosystem, negotiated contract terms can flow directly into downstream financial workflows. Information doesn’t need to be manually re-entered, because a single source of truth is now used across systems. That single source of truth also helps make sure payments reflect the agreements already reached.

These benefits extend beyond startup. Contract amendments are common and can impact the financial terms used in payment processes. When those updates flow through the same connected ecosystem, sponsors can reduce the manual handoffs and duplicate work that amendments introduce.

The value of connectivity extends beyond efficiency alone. When contracting, budgeting and payment processes are connected, sponsors gain greater continuity across the study lifecycle. Decisions made during negotiations can be carried forward more consistently into downstream financial activities, helping reduce the disconnects that often arise when information is managed across separate systems and workflows.

A more intelligent approach to contracting

For the foreseeable future, contracting and budget negotiations will continue to require human collaboration, discussion and judgement. But by connecting data, digitally capturing institutional knowledge and embedding AI into workflows, sponsors can reduce repetitive work, shorten negotiation cycles and help studies move from planning to patient enrollment faster.

As study complexity continues to grow, the organisations that gain the most value from AI will be those using technology to preserve knowledge, improve consistency and apply human expertise more effectively across the study lifecycle. Sponsors that modernise contracting now will be better positioned to reduce study startup delays, improve consistency across sites and scale financial operations more effectively across their trial portfolios.