In these turbulent times, if there's anything that we have learned as human beings from the past couple of years, it is that we are better when we work together. This happens to be the fundamental ethos of The Synergist. In 2021 we continued to apply a growing expertise in facilitating collaboration and cooperation in many different areas, driven by the motivation and dedication of our partners and of global leaders and champions across various health topics.

Our partners prove that true, effective collaboration outperforms historically fragmented and isolated efforts. It’s not simply discussing issues or having a working meeting. It’s a replicable and workable model that enables systematic joint impact and success. By corroborating necessary skills from each stakeholder and enhancing the final combination by asking the most pertinent question - why? - and ensuring it is answered. This promotes buy-in and ensures widespread adoption of the eventual outcome.

In 2021 we engaged with 73 organization members across a variety of projects - a network of almost 16,000 engaged and highly experienced contributors who are closely involved in our activities and enthusiastically co-creating with us the future of healthcare.

As we reach the next level, we remain focused on consolidating this growth and continuing to develop our team, its toolbox and co-creation methodologies. These include a multi-dimensional Synapse, focused on pertinent healthcare issues such as patient engagement, precision medicine, medtech, digital health and maternal health, as well as a robust governance model, a diverse network of expertise, and shared services including marketing & communications, finance, IT and operational services. These shared services allow us to offer a very broad set of skills and expertise way beyond what a single consortium structure could propose.

Our growing team is covering a wide portfolio of projects and continuously embracing new ones, with an unique approach that leads to unprecedented efficiencies as our agility allows us to quickly adapt shared experiences and best practices across projects.

The Synergist’s collaboration manual and real-life methodology have consistently been shown to be as foolproof as it is easy to use and practical. Our team has replicated it with great success in our new project, From Testing to Targeted Treatments (FT3), which is currently progressing at speed as it becomes an even bigger success. 2021 also included big leaps for PFMD, with obvious expansion beyond the initial drug development scope, with several new workstreams launching and advancing simultaneously - the Patient Experience Data (PED), Clinical Trial Information Network, Patient Engagement Open Forum, Patient Engagement in MedTech and Patient Engagement in Digital Health & Data.

Each project celebrated achievements and milestones in the course of the year; for example, PFMD launched its Patient Experience Data initiative, while four more of the popular How To Guides were produced. Meanwhile, FT3 launched its Precision Medicine Synapse and established a Community of Practice that continues to grow with the support of refined membership approach, an agile stakeholder engagement strategy and ongoing engagement with precision medicine and patient communities. This is continuous learning. The Patient Engagement Open Forum continued its pivot to online with four successful iterations bringing over 2,000 people together on the topic of patient engagement last year and the 7th edition of Safe Motherhood Week in 2021 addressed the impact of COVID-19 on maternal health and reproductive care, as well as the need to reduce the information gap on the safety of medication during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

As a natural progression, The Synergist has now agreed to provide specific support to other actors, as we apply our model for better collaboration to other plans and projects, for example by building their co-creation capacity and capability to operate in a multi-stakeholder environment. The readiness to engage external stakeholders, the public and patients is turning into a strategic success factor and many organizations are looking at developing it. As we grow and evolve, we see the forthcoming year as an opportunity to strengthen and expand our portfolio of competences, tools and resources to help all stakeholders succeed..

What next for our projects and our partners? We are more than aware that agility is the skill of the future and is critical to the management and optimisation of a complex environment. The Synergist’s innovative model is inherently agile and ensures that our activities are futureproofed in this rapidly changing and dynamic world we find ourselves living in, but without forgetting what makes things possible - the human connection.