Faster costing and contracting

The NHS is made up of many separate organisations. To facilitate faster costing and contracting between commercial sponsors and NHS sites, there are two UK-wide tools which enable NHS organisations to work together to speed up study set-up:

• interactive Costing Tool (iCT): a standardised commercial costing methodology for resource and location based price calculations.
• Model agreements: a suite of standard agreements designed for a range of research scenarios, including a model confidentiality agreement, and supported by guidance documents all available as templates within IRAS.

National contract value review (NCVR) 

How we use these tools is changing. A UK national contract value review (NCVR) process, using these tools, is being implemented from 1 October 2022 to further improve study set-up times. Visit the NHS England website to find out more about the NCVR. 

You can also view some helpful infographics which summarise some of the main features of the new UK national contract value review process.  

• How the national review supports commercial research set-up and where this process fits in terms of overall activities (Infogram)
• How the costing tool user roles support partnership working and enable a UK national contract value review (Infogram)
• Explanations of the key responsibilities for all three user roles - including some handy top tips
  • iCT User Role Profile - Company Representative (Infogram)
  • iCT User Role Profile - Study Resource Reviewer (Infogram)
  • iCT User Role Profile - Site Representative (Infogram)
• iCT and Study Resource Review (Infogram)

Employees of life sciences companies and contract research organisations may find the infographic describing the  Company Representative iCT User Role Profile (Infogram) useful.

Benefits of the new national contract value review process:

• A UK-wide, standardised, approach to costing and contracting for commercial contract research.
• Improved consistency in multi-site study set-up.
• Increasing the speed and efficiency of research set-up - increasing the capacity for more research in the NHS .