2021 Annual Report - European Funded Projects

About the project

The objective of the IMI Gravitate Health project is to improve patient access, understanding and adherence to patient information. Nowadays, being unable to easily access and understand high-quality health information is a significant handicap, impacting the day-to-day decisions people make in the management of their health and care.

The Gravitate Health mission is to equip and empower citizens as users with digital tools that make them confident, active, and responsive in their patient journey, specifically encouraging safe use of medicines for improved adherence, better health outcomes and higher quality of life.

Building on our expertise in bringing together diverse people, organizations and experts to sustainably solve societal issues, The Synergist has a leading role in two work packages within the project as a sub-task lead in both.

In 2021, the Synergist successfully completed one sub-task which aimed to elicit and prioritize stakeholder needs in order to lay the groundwork for the subsequent tasks in the project. This was achieved by the application of a simplified Delphi methodology, which is a consensus-building approach.

In the second work package, our role is to support the consortium throughout the project by identifying consortium needs in engaging with stakeholders, helping to identify opportunities and potential areas of duplication, and to co-create stakeholder engagement tools.

In 2021, the initial intake of stakeholder engagement in the consortium was kickstarted as part of a broader stakeholder engagement strategy, and an internal and external repository was created to collect all materials that support stakeholder engagement.

About the project

The SYNCHROS project (SYNergies for Cohorts in Health: integrating the ROle of all Stakeholders) seeks to address and solve a highly complex issue on data fragmentation in population-based, patient and clinical trial cohorts. Its objective is to come with a recommendation to address the lack of data integration and harmonization across the different cohorts.

This project requires extensive stakeholder involvement, a systematic approach and methodology, and navigation through a complex system. The Synergist’s unique expertise and experience in solving complex societal issues by addressing broken systems and our ability to act as an incubator and gather relevant partners around a shared goal was recognized to be of key value for this EU project.

To disseminate the important findings of Work Package 4 the Synergist, as Work Package leader, collaborated with the other contributors in the drafting of an academic paper.

The conceptual frame of the publication relies on a practice-based approach: the aim is to give researchers an overview of how new communication technologies can be used in relevant contexts according to methodological, infrastructure, and ethical/legal domains. In doing so, the paper examines application scenarios and develops decision trees. The decision trees will correspond to different temporal phases of the data collection (preparatory phase, active data collection phase, evaluation phase). ​​The publication is expected to be submitted by the end of March 2022.

About the project

Share4Rare (S4R) is an online community to gather patients, carers, clinicians and researchers to join forces and make a difference in rare diseases. It was conceptualized to meet the need of involving patients and families living with a rare condition in research, leveraging their expertise in their disease and the sharing of medical information and clinical data.

The main objective of the S4R project was to build a collective participatory and international platform of patients, caregivers, researchers and other stakeholders from the rare disease field. Its aim was to generate knowledge of understudied diseases and to collate relevant scientific and health-related information and resources for patients and families living with rare conditions.

In 2021 S4R came to a close, with a successful and extremely positive feedback from both its communities and the funding partner.

From the start of the project, The Synergist assumed an active role in designing and incubating a collaborative friendly, sustainable and scalable Share4Rare ecosystem and organization to run its deployment and long-term activities based on the principle of shared value for all stakeholders.

In 2021 The Synergist played a leadership role in the delivery of the platform captology plan and tactics, management of the online community engagement outside the platform, including monitoring and ongoing reporting, as well as ongoing feedback for the consortium to support the platform growth. We worked closely with our partners in delivering a smooth and enjoyable user experience for all stakeholders, we supported the engagement of key stakeholders in the main project pilots, helped further define the project unique value propositions for sustainability purposes and was an enthusiastic contributor to the development and delivery of the project communication strategy.