WASHINGTON — FDA Commissioner Robert Califf wants private insurers to chip in on doing post-approval clinical research on drugs. It’s a new request from the agency chief, who’s long pushed to find new ways to test drugs.
“I’m not aware of a major effort by the insurance plans to help people get studies done,” he said at America’s Health Insurance Plans conference on Thursday. “In fact, what I’m hearing from clinicians out there is just the opposite, that it’s very hard to do research in the current environment.”
Califf spent much of his career in clinical research. Since he was FDA commissioner during the last year of the Obama administration, he has advocated for modernizing the clinical research system. The FDA plays a major role in those reforms, and Califf is a proponent of incorporating so-called real-world evidence into the system.
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