What is Vyva Sync?
What is it?
The Vyva Sync consensus platform is an innovative digital solution to an important issue. It brings consensus into the 21st century, enabling physicians to participate online, in their own time, upload supporting evidence, comment on questions, vote on statements and reach consensus rapidly. It creates an audit trail for compliance, does not disadvantage those whose first language is not English, allows full participation from all and collects a body of evidence for each consensus developed. It can be set up in less than an hour and will revolutionise this aspect of medical communications.
According to the Council of Europe a ‘medical consensus’ is a public statement on a particular aspect of medical knowledge that is generally agreed upon as an evidence-based, state of the art knowledge by a representative group of experts in that area. Its main objective is to counsel physicians on the best possible and acceptable way to address a particular decision-making area for diagnosis, management or treatment.
There are different ways of producing medical consensus. One involves a physical meeting or series of meetings, where an independent panel of experts is convened – perhaps in a conference setting – to vote on and agree consensus statements. Another is a Delphi or quasi Delphi process which involves sending out questions or statements, aggregating and anonymising feedback, and sharing them with the group in a number of cycles until consensus is reached.
So what's the problem?
Both these methods have drawbacks – in terms of time taken, cost, and audit trail (body of evidence to support the consensus statements, participants’ individual contributions to the process). Indeed, GPP3, which ensures compliance and transparency and good publication practice for clinical trial data publications, does not cover consensus statements, position papers or clinical management guidelines.
Vyva Sync - the Solution: Four unique benefits
Timely
Rapid deployment globally saves time meaning that physicians have expert guidelines quicker.
Cost effective
One single digital platform reduces unnecessary costs, such as travel and accommodation.
Compliant
Compliance and transparency are ensured with an audit trail of every participant input.
Equitable
The end-to-end process is fair and balanced with all participants receiving an equal share of voice.
Can I use it for any other collaborations?
Additionally the Vyva Sync board can be used for pre-work for Advisory Boards, for Round Tables, Steering Committee Work and Expert Exchanges. We have sold it successfully for this purpose to both leading global pharmaceutical companies and patient group.
A little history
Vyva was orginally founded in 2011 to house an interactive digital publications project which eventually became subsumed within digital publishing for the newly introduced iPad. When we started to formulate the concept of our collaboration platform Vyva became its new home.
The consensus platform sprang from the need for a pharmaceutical client who needed to develop consensus management guidelines for a rare disease drug quickly and cost effectively.
With input from the lead in a medical communications agency, we developed the consensus platform which won an innovation award at PMEA, the pharmaceutical industry awards.
We added new functionality, and subsequently sold the platform to several other pharmaceutical clients who used it for pre work for advisory boards. To date the platform has been used by Pfizer, Merck, AbbVie, Chiesi, Horizon, the Belgian Dermatological Society and Hansa.
We are constantly developing the capabilities of the platform and, unlike other providers in this space, we’ll be making our roadmap public in Q2 2020. Much of this is predicated on feedback from users and we are really looking forward to growing the Vyva community and contributing to the acceleration of consensus across the global healthcare space.