Fortrea Clinical Trials

What is Fortrea Clinical Trials?

Fortrea Clinical Trials is one of several biomedical operations that pay individuals to participate in clinical trials. The trials are aimed at assessing the safety and efficacy of new drugs.

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How it works:

Paid clinical trials are generally done in person and often involve overnight stays in a hospital or clinic-like setting, plus multiple check-in visits. As a result, its easiest to sign up for clinical trails that are within reasonable commute from your home.

Fortrea has three facilities in the U.S. — in Dallas, Texas; Madison, Wisconsin; and Daytona Beach, Florida.

If you want to sign up for paid clinical trials, you simply go to the Fortrea website and look at the studies available. When we checked in Sept. of 2023, the Dallas facility was conducting a cholesterol study, looking for healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 65. The Daytona Beach facility was looking for healthy subjects between 18 and 70 for an obesity drug. The Wisconsin facility was looking for young and middle-aged men as well as breastfeeding women.

Screening

Subjects who want to apply for any study need to go through a screening process, often both in person and over the phone. The screening is aimed at ensuring that you’re a viable candidate for the specific research. You can potentially be screened out as the result of particular health conditions, your body mass index, or other factors.

Their intent is to ensure the medication they’re testing is not likely to harm you. Researchers will already have tested this drug in animals, so they may know that people with certain allergies or, say, high blood pressure, might be at risk of harm from the drug. Thus, if you had these conditions, you would be screened out.

But they also want to ensure that you are representative of the type of person who might take this drug. To quality for a test of an obesity drug, for instance, the subjects Body Mass Index needed to be between 35 and 45. (You can calculate your BMI and learn about what this figure means from the National Institute of Health site here.)

Pay

Pay for each test is listed on the page describing the research. This page also provides basic information about what’s required, such as overnight stays and follow-up visits. Payments are often generous, ranging from several hundred dollars to several thousand.

A trial involving an obesity medication, for instance, promises pay of more than $21,000. However, this study also requires three 8-night overnight stays and 11 follow-up visits.

A study for a cholesterol drug, meanwhile, requires just one 8-night stay and one follow-up visit. This study pays about $3,900.

Payments are generally made over the course of the research.

Working conditions

What do you have to do to earn all that money? Subject yourself to a substantial number of blood draws, urine tests and other procedures. It’s a lot like going to a doctor’s office. Overnight stays are like staying in a hospital or dorm room. You’re usually sharing a room, typically with someone of the same gender.

You can read, watch t.v., play games, or work on your laptop. However, you generally cannot leave the facility for the duration of the study period.

Risks

The risks of each study also vary. However, they’re explained in detail when you go through the physical and telephone screenings. All studies are regulated by the Food & Drug Administration.

It’s important to note that you are allowed to back out of a study at any time. So, if you find that the side-effects of a drug are highly uncomfortable or onerous, you can back out of the study. You may not get paid, if you do. However, you should never jeopardize your health for payment.

Recommendations

We don’t see a lot of complaints about Fortrea and clinical trials pay so generously that they’re hard to resist. However, trials are always done in person and if you don’t live within the geographic range of this site, you can find a clinical trial based on your zip code here. 

What their users say

Fortrea is a relatively recent successor to Covance Clinical Trials, so we have used reviews related to Covance here.

“The situation seems to be getting better. The staff checks on us to see what we think. They’ve started keeping the contractor honest about providing what’s on the menu. Meaning the amount of food being served is now closer to adult size. The breakfast still needs work. The cereal served is a pre-packaged kid sized bowl, sausage is one thin Pattie, small egg, or 2 thin pieces of bacon. The staff is pretty awesome in general. Lots of turn over from the shut down. So a lot of learning going on. There seems to be an effort to improve how things run to some extent. Getting a bed earlier, the parking lot seems safer to park in, getting paid a little quicker.”

“I’ll recommend not driving your own vehicle if you are staying long. There are break-ins and vehicle thefts all the time. People that work in the building suffer from it too. In my 2 stays, I saw 2 break-ins, 3 pickup thefts, everything was focused on trucks. One from in front of the security guards desk, even. Covance doesn’t care. So protect yourself, they won’t.”

“After all the testing, necessary disclosures, yada yada yada it turns out I was disqualified because they had already selected enough viable participants.  There goes 4 hours of my life on a good Monday morning that I’ll never get back again.”