COVID-19 Business Continuity Planning Pulse - Week of April 20, 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, we’re sharing this week’s BCP PULSE to keep you aware of our efforts. 

AN EYE ON WHAT’S NEXT – ACTIVATION AND ADVANCEMENT

Over the past week, we’ve seen many conversations shift from “what if?” to “what now?” – indicating some regions of the world are focused on reactivation strategies. For instance, in China, some of our patient-focused Commercial field teams are collaborating with customers to resume engagement with hospitals, providing critical disease management information to patients. In Europe and APAC, we’re building Restart Assessments for Clinical customers, focused on reactivation best practices.

Our Business Continuity Transition Management Office (TMO) continues to manage regional differences in restrictions, while planning for a restart reality complying with the appropriate protocols and mandates. An office return will include evaluating the appropriate cleaning and safety protocols, staging the return in waves based upon needs, and ensuring adequate supplies of personal protective equipment. 

Beyond Business Continuity Planning, we’re updating you on our perspectives to address this pandemic:

• Virtual Approaches to Clinical Research – Sign up for our April 23^rd  webinar, “Virtual Research: What It Is & What It’s Doing in the Real-World Setting,” to explore how virtual approaches to clinical research can empower patients by bringing the research process to them, as well as challenges that arise when doing so.
• Clinical Development in the COVID-19 Era – Join our April 24^th webinar, “Trial Continuity and Restarting Quickly, Safely and Successfully,” where we’ll reveal a staged approach that can help biopharmaceutical companies of all sizes mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on trials.

BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING UPDATE

Our Business Continuity Planning Transition Management Office (TMO), in alignment with FDA, CDC, WHO and other local and international health authority guidance, includes numerous workstreams. Each week, we’re including select workstream updates to keep you aware of our learnings and efforts.

• Regional/Country Assessment
  • Ongoing, standardized assessment of risk indicators and other multi-factorial inputs on a regional and country level, enabling rapid guidance and updates related to working from home, site visit policies, and travel limitations/restrictions. 
  • Custom-built interactive map displaying operational status of all Syneos Health office locations globally overlaid with COVID-19 reports via John Hopkins University to provide a “near real-time” assessment of our capacity to operate through this crisis.

• Business Technology
  • Around-the-clock monitoring to ensure our IT infrastructure remains resilient and is able to support remote work (e.g., increase in use of video and teleconferencing services) and any added load to customer-facing or service delivery technology.
  • Custom-built, shared trackers and dashboards help visualize status of key indicators and enable us to focus on areas of concern in near real-time.

• Corporate Communications
  • Rapid and real-time internal and external communications planning designed to ensure updates and changes can be communicated swiftly to multiple audiences who need to know specific information. 
  • Weekly BCP Pulse distribution and real-time COVID-19 Resource Center updates including Corporate, Clinical Monitoring, and Commercial Virtual Field Team learnings, in addition to Subject Matter Expert podcasts and webinars, to ensure you have access to our latest actions and perspectives.

• Clinical
  • Tracking and recording of any Planned Deviation to ensure project teams have the agility to amend processes to respond to this new operating environment.
  • Additional functionality to CTMS and new dashboards to provide project-wide views and monitor site restrictions and flag potential enrollment delays.

• Commercial
  • Ongoing evaluation of remote field teams to identify best practices and, where appropriate, to have this information inform our post-COVID offerings and activities.
  • Rapid survey deployment to healthcare stakeholders – HCPs, payers, clinical sites – to gain data and insights into COVID-19 response, impact and needs.

• Human Resources
  • Global, regional and local management and guidance surrounding the health and well-being of our people, their families and the communities where we work and serve, in line with public health practices, and local labor and employment requirements.
  • Rapid and real-time COVID-19 potential exposure and positive identification self-reporting measures and protocols aligned with local guidance and contact tracing.
  • Identifying our employees’ questions and issues in a dynamic knowledge base repository, and curating FAQ responses to keep teams informed and connected.

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.