COVID-19 Business Continuity Planning Pulse – October 2020
Customer Colleagues,
At Syneos Health, our priorities continue to be protecting our employees’ health and safety, and partnering with our customers, sponsors and investigators to deliver life-saving medicines to patients worldwide. As part of our commitment to continuous communication, following our initial Business Continuity Planning (BCP) update and weekly editions, we’re now issuing a monthly BCP PULSE to keep you aware of our efforts.
CONTINUOUS PLANNING FOR AGILE RESPONSE
At Syneos Health, two key activities filled the last days of summer: supporting employees as many faced transition dynamics with family returning to schools and workplaces; and layering on long-standing business continuity plans in anticipation of the upcoming influenza and cold season, and evolving trends in COVID-19 cases.
At the moment, many of our offices are accessible for essential staff or for those with business-essential reasons and permission to visit the office. We’re slowly expanding access for individuals and small teams as needed. At the same time, we’re evaluating and enhancing our use of technology platforms as collaboration continues in a virtual world for colleagues and customers.
Investigator sites remain a key priority. Syneos Health is working hand-in-hand with sites and sponsors to tackle critical challenges like uninterrupted engagement, access, payment and ongoing support.
BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING REACTIVATION SUMMARY
Our Business Continuity Planning Transition Management Office (TMO), in alignment with FDA, CDC, WHO and other local and international health authority guidance, includes multiple workstreams. In each BCP PULSE, we’re including select workstream updates to keep you aware of our learnings and efforts.
- Regulatory Guidance: Aggregating and synthesizing EMA and FDA guidance, updating regulations and restrictions in order to provide direction to our employees and customers on when – or when not – to pivot and/or reactivate.
- Change Management: Working internally and with customers on change management activities to ensure preparedness as dynamics shift.
- Field Team Connections: Monitoring company-by-company redeployment activities, compiling best practices for remote activities and HCP preferences, and benchmarking remote versus in-person detailing metrics.
- Sponsor Connections: Working collaboratively with sponsors in the “now normal” to press forward with studies underway while activating new trials.
- Continued Preparedness Planning: Preparing for evolving trends in COVID-19 cases, coupled with the annual influenza surge, by developing scenario plans and sharing best-practice learnings.
BEST PRACTICES – BEING AGILE TO ADAPT TO OUR EVOLVED ENVIRONMENT
Working hand in hand with hundreds of companies – and our 24,000 employees worldwide – we’re designing clinical and commercial solutions every day. Each challenge presents the opportunity to apply key learnings to build better approaches and resiliency.
- Next-Generation Customer Engagement Solutions: The global pandemic has proven to be a transformation catalyst, radically accelerating changes that our industry has anticipated for years. HCPs are drastically changing the way they engage with both patients and pharma, prompting life sciences companies to focus on channel optimization to fill reach and frequency gaps and meet the new receptivity to non-personal promotion. We’ve taken a relationship-first approach to enhance the impact of active sales teams -- always keeping the rep relationship front and center, while enabling teams to both broaden the number of outreach channels they can effectively utilize and better tailor each touchpoint for greater impact. You can read more here.
REAL-TIME RESOURCES
We’re regularly updating our COVID-19 Resource Center with capabilities and perspectives to navigate, deliver and learn together. We’re looking to exchange your learnings and experiences too. Should you have ideas, comments or concerns, please contact us.
Thank you for your partnership.
