Development of a table of standard costs for conducting clinical trials in Australia

The project methodology featured the development of a discussion paper as the basis of a call for public submissions; a broad stakeholder consultation process involving visits to nine public and three private hospitals to gather data to support activity based costing; discussions with trial sponsors (industry and research collaboratives) and other interested parties; detailed analysis of the information generated to calculate a standard cost for each of the 42 items on the revised List, and a three round Delphi process involving members of the Steering Committee acting as an Expert Reference Group (ERG) to reach consensus on the standard cost for each item.