Syneos Health Medical Affairs Spotlight

Supplier Spotlight® highlights the unique skills and services offered by organizations who are part of our CONNECTED COMMUNITY™. We recently spoke with experts from Syneos Health Medical Affairs about how their organization is uniquely positioned to address the changing dynamics in the healthcare landscape with the increased emphasis on engagement with a broad set of stakeholders and an expanded focus on value-based therapies. Read the interview below!

 

What is your company’s mission?

Syneos Health® Medical Affairs is committed to providing life sciences companies with the depth and breadth of medical affairs expertise needed to support evidence-based strategies across the product lifecycle – optimizing product development and maximizing value while improving patient outcomes. We aim to be a strategic partner delivering insight, scientific expertise, organization excellence and purposeful engagement to help our customers navigate the challenging – and often unpredictable – journey from lab to life.

What products and services do you offer?

Our Medical Affairs teams combine deep scientific and therapeutic expertise with integrated capabilities in strategic consulting, Real World Evidence (RWE) and Heath Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) generation to highlight clinical and economic value, medical communications, field medical solutions, insights and impact measurement analytics. Our RWE Solutions group is fully integrated within our Medical Affairs organization. The iterative feedback loop among these capabilities produces real-time insights to inform product development strategy – enabling us to help eliminate barriers, identify synergies and deliver efficiency, connectivity and continuous strategic value to our customers’ organizations.

What problems do you solve?

Innovative new treatments with the potential to improve patients’ lives face unprecedented obstacles, including the greater complexity and cost of new therapies; more stringent evidence requirements to secure patient access beyond regulatory approval; a greater diversity of stakeholders and decision makers; and heightened competition for share of voice.

Consequently, stakeholder engagement – whether with HCPs, patients, regulators advocates or payers – has become increasingly science-based and evidence-driven. Generating actionable evidence, including RWE and HEOR data – in a timely manner has become a key objective.

Medical Affairs is uniquely positioned to address these dynamics as the only strategic function that touches a therapy along the entire product development lifecycle. In this new era, Syneos Health Medical Affairs is uniquely capable of offering both stand-alone and integrated solutions that can lead to greater clinical and commercial success and improved patient outcomes – maximizing the potential of an asset, portfolio of products and evolving Medical Affairs organizations.

What are the most innovative tools and technologies that you offer?

Syneos Health has developed a programmatic channel-selecting stack – we call it Digital Amplifier – to enable clinical teams to reach HCPs on a 1:1 basis at scale, across all digital environments. Applied initially to amplifying the impact of field teams, Digital Amplifier makes it possible to surround the physician with specific messages triggered by the physician’s digital preferences, driving awareness of medications, devices, as well as clinical trials relevant to their patient populations – all informed by that HCP’s practice and preferences.

Syneos Health Medical Affairs also deploys IMPACT (Innovative Medical Affairs Professionals Assessment of Capabilities/Competencies Tool), a proprietary diagnostic survey for evaluating how Medical Affairs is creating value, whether its current capabilities support the needs of the organization, and – based on the benchmarking data this tool is generating – for understanding whether they are a leader in a specific capability, or conversely, if any capability gaps are unique to their situation or part of broader industry dynamics.

We have also developed a comprehensive solution that integrates big data sets with perception research to help Medical Affairs teams better understand the medical landscape and quantitatively analyze shifts in perception and awareness over time, identify the medical universe for personal and non-personal engagements, prioritize targets and allocate field-based medical team resources.

What are your competitive advantages?

At Syneos Health, Medical Affairs operates as a key strategic pillar of product development connecting R&D and Commercial. We provide life sciences companies with an exceptional breadth and depth of medical affairs expertise, characterized by:

• Focus on the Future: We are focused on where the industry is going, not stuck on where it’ has been. We believe strategic engagement by medical affairs leaders can optimize launch trajectories years in advance.

• Practical and Connected Strategy & Execution: Our connected and multidisciplinary model results in long-term strategies that translate into the executable solutions needed to drive positive perception of clinical and patient value.

• Fully Integrated Evidence Capabilities: RWE is fully integrated across our Medical Affairs offering as a critical tool for holistic evidence generation that highlights product value to key stakeholders, complementing our heritage in traditional clinical research.

• Next-Generation Leadership Development: As medical affairs professionals engage with an increasingly diverse range of stakeholders, we emphasize learning agility and business acumen to build high-performing teams.

Just as significantly, we are powered by the strength of Syneos Health itself and inspired by our shared product development experience and mindset.

• From 2017 through 2021, Syneos Health has helped to develop or commercialize 94% of Novel New Drugs approved by the FDA via CDER and 95% of novel products granted marketing authorization by the EMA.

• We have:
  • Global reach in all major geographies
  • Therapeutic expertise in all major categories
  • Adaptability and scalability based on your unique needs
  • Ability to advance an asset without dilutions or reduced ownership
  • Collaborative approach to development and commercialization timelines
  • Demonstrated results in advancing clinical and commercial success

Who are your clients?

Syneos Health Medical Affairs works with life sciences companies of all sizes, from large biopharmaceutical companies to small and emerging biotechnology firms.

What new products and services are you developing in 2022/23?

To address the long-standing need to better demonstrate the value of Medical Affairs, we are building a new KPI framework built on mixed methods research and powered by new data and analytics models, to generate a true measure of the contribution Medical Affairs makes toward disease state awareness, stakeholders’ knowledge and confidence in a particular therapy’s mechanism of action, patient-centered decision-making efforts and other key metrics (this isn’t an exhaustive list). We are also developing an advanced insights management platform enabling Medical Affairs organizations to establish more effective, efficient and impactful strategies and solutions.

Where are your laboratories and offices located?

Syneos Health has global reach in all major geographies. We bring together approximately 29,000 minds, across more than 110 countries, with a deep understanding of patient and physician behaviors and market dynamics. Together we share insights, use the latest technologies and apply advanced business practices to speed our customers’ delivery of important therapies to patients.

 

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