Rechargeable Incentive Card (RIC)

RIC is a combination Incentive and Subject management system for clinical trials - its unique combination of financial and healthcare data management, designed from the beginning to be compliant with financial and healthcare regulations, including HIPAA, brings new visibility to locator and incentive information, and helps to increase follow-up rates and improve study data quality.

 According to a meta-analysis[i] across 85 longitudinal studies, one third of subjects in clinical trials are lost to attrition within 36 months. This creates a significant challenge in successfully tracking, locating and following-up with the subjects and indirectly poses a threat to the validity of the findings.

Follow-up rates below 80% have been shown to produce dramatically biased estimates[ii]. Although, clinical researchers have created best practices to maintain a retention rate of 80% or more using information technology and data collection (similar to the tracking manual developed by UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Program[iii]). Traditional methods for tracking enrolled subjects are labor intensive and add costly overheads on the study. According to a study[iv], the cost of tracking and retaining subjects can be as high as $175,000 every year.

Challenges in Clinical Studies:

  • Burden on the research subjects to remember follow-up appointments
  • No mechanism for instant reward for positive actions
  • Use it or lose it gift cards are not widely accepted. No way to replace a lost gift card.
  • Administrative burdens on the study for securing cash or cash equivalent gift cards
  • Social stigma associated with food stamps and other gift certificates

Calance Corporation in partnership with UCLA ISAP has developed HIPAA compliant software (RIC), funded in parts by the National Institutes of Health, to automate subjects and incentive management in clinical research setting.

Bridging Banking Regulations and Subject Privacy

RIC provides interviewers and researchers a secured system to track subjects, update locater information and provide incentives instantaneously to the subjects over the phone.

Calance in North America focuses in the markets where data is highly regulated. Our deep expertise in the banking industries and healthcare positions us to address the subject privacy and yet comply with the payment industry regulations (Anti-money laundering and Patriot Act).

Calance has partnered with an industry leader to provide widely accepted customizable VISA and MasterCard to the clinical researchers. In a clinical study, funded by the NIH, subjects found the incentives disbursement using RIC payment cards better than Gift Cards, Money Orders and Points. While the subjects prefer cash over payment cards, the convenience of doing the follow-up on the phone and instantly receiving incentives outweighed the feeling in most subjects.

RIC system maintains a separation between the tracking data (shielding subject identity) from the follow-ups and incentives. This allows the researcher to separate incentive management function from the study protocols. In addition to reducing the effort and cost associated with the traditional subject tracking, RIC system incorporates the checks and balances to reduce pilferage and reduces the burden of securing cash equivalent incentives.

Features

The RIC system offers an intuitive web interface designed for researchers and clinics involved studies with human subjects. The application has been designed in collaboration with researchers involved with clinical studies.features

RIC system automates the tracking and locating of subjects and the administration of incentives and brings together key elements in human study administration that are currently managed in isolation - subject engagement, subject tracking, follow-up events, and incentives.

  • RIC offers immediate association between action and reward
  • Instant transfer of incentives
  • Lost/stolen card replacement
  • RIC can differentia the monetary value of the reward for each act, allowing the researcher to create sophisticated escalating incentive models (providing higher incentives for not missing any follow-ups)
  • MasterCard/Visa branded custom cards are widely accepted

Future Releases

Future release plans includes, integration between an IVR (telephony) system for automated incentives transfer on weekly location update, rule based calendar generation for follow-up and incentives calculations, support of additional databases.

Technology

RIC system is built using industry standard best practices using the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). RIC is offered to the researcher as a license or a hosted solution.

  • The application is building using J2EE, MySQL and Apache/Tomcat.
  • Platform independent architecture supports Linux or Windows platform for deployment.
  • Can work with tracking databases built in SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle or FileMaker.
  • 128 bit encryption and double authentication using secure tokens in addition to role based access control.

Future Releases

Future release plans includes, integration between an IVR (telephony) system for automated incentives transfer on weekly location update, rule based calendar generation for follow-up and incentives calculations, support of additional databases.

Technology

RIC system is built using industry standard best practices using the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). RIC is offered to the researcher as a license or a hosted solution.

  • The application is building using J2EE, MySQL and Apache/Tomcat.
  • Platform independent architecture supports Linux or Windows platform for deployment.
  • Can work with tracking databases built in SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle or FileMaker.
  • 128 bit encryption and double authentication using secure tokens in addition to role based access control.

 

Download a RIC Data sheet for more detailed information. 

Contact Us                                                 +1 (425) 605-0716

RIC@calance.com                                       28889 152nd Ave NE, Ste 100

                                           Redmond, WA 98052


[i] Hansen, Tobler & Graham, 1990

[ii] Nemes at all (2002)

[iii] http://www.uclaisap.org/trackingmanual/manual/Tracking-Manual.pdf,

[iv] Gerstein & Johnson, 2000