Syneos Health 2022 Health Trends

Syneos Health’s 2022 Health Trends: Insights for Industry Change Agents. From patient-powered design to accelerated integration across the product lifecycle, this year’s Trends report empowers organizations to be catalysts for change by anticipating what’s to come.

Trends for 2022 focus on new models for creating stakeholder value, the importance of prioritizing human relationships at every healthcare encounter and strengthening technology-enabled insights to speed the delivery of life-changing therapies to patients.

The top 10 trends set to catalyze the year ahead align around key themes focused on Value Creation, Human Centricity and Industry Change.

Value creation: Ensuring that data and insights flow across the product lifecycle to deliver on innovation’s promise, creating greater value for all stakeholders.

• Appropriate acceleration in clinical development
  Acceleration will be driven by innovative study design and execution, real world data engines, flexible decentralized engagement and dynamic contracting.
• Engagement optimization loop
  New commercial models will have two key dimensions: The human and the digital. Omnichannel engagement will be used to amplify critical human interactions and deliver powerful insights on when and how to act most efficiently in all channels.
• Patient-powered design
  As the patient voice rises, a long-standing communications gap between patients and those who innovate on their behalf is finally beginning to close.

Human centricity: Prioritizing the personal relationships at the core of every healthcare interaction and strengthening them with tech-enabled insights.

• The changing customer interface
  Look for important disruptions in how key stakeholders engage with each other, including a newly hybrid field, changing roles for clinical research associates (CRAs), new paths to recruitment and simplification of the complex.
• Engaging the burned-out healthcare professional
  A profession that already faced dangerous levels of burnout has suffered even more over the last two years fighting a pandemic, lacking access to patients, a short supply of critical resources and isolation from peers. Engaging them is different now.​
• High expectations for/from top talent
  In the span of a year, we went from unprecedented hiring levels across biopharma in response to the urgent need to support public safety, to many organizations being short staffed against changing business priorities.
• Personal, tailored and now possible
  According to a recent benchmarking study by Syneos Health, biopharma leaders on average rate their use of modern customer engagement and omnichannel infrastructure at six out of 10, notably better than prior to the pandemic. In 2022, the transformation accelerates.

Industry change: Stepping up to address social policy public health issues head-on, leading by example in a newly dynamic environment for innovation.

• Urgency for representation
  Advancing DE&I inside biopharma organizations and among stakeholder populations will be a critical strategic priority for the industry in 2022 and beyond.
• Rx rep(utation)
  Pharmaceutical industry reputation showed an unprecedented resurgence in 2021—largely due to its rapid response to the pandemic. At the same time, trust in government institutions suffered—leaving manufacturers to fill the void by communicating with scientific rigor and transparency. Maintaining and growing the industry’s reputation will be a key opportunity for 2022.
• A new era of market dynamism
  After years of responding and reacting, biopharma is ready to take bold new steps forward, leveraging new levels of funding, new resourcing models and partners for enhancing asset value, new global centers of excellence—and even new constraints—to advance life sciences innovation.