Pledging to patients: what can you to do enhance patient engagement?

Dr Cyndi Grossman, Director, explains why FasterCures, a center of the Milken Institute  is encouraging patient engagement advocates to take the PFMD pledge
In the coming weeks, FasterCures aims to increase the number of pledges to 1,000 by urging members of its broad patient engagement community to commit to specific actions that will have a real impact on patients.
‘Our goal is to expand the choir of people who are working to engage patients meaningfully in biomedical R&D and product development,’ says Dr Cyndi, Director at FasterCures.
‘That is why we are excited to partner with Patient Focused Medicines Development (PFMD), to expand the suite of ongoing patient engagement initiatives in their SYNaPsE platform as well as to share their Pledge to Patients.’
People and organizations can design commitments that suit their work and deliver changes that make a measurable difference to medicines development. Later on, they can update their progress and repeat the process.
‘What I particularly like about this approach is that it can be tailored: people and organizations can make the commitments that fit them and come up with tangible ways that they are going to follow through,’ she says.
‘That can mean setting up broad policies and practices on how you conduct patient engagement or conducting specific tasks in your approach to recruiting patients or designing clinical trial endpoints – it’s not about everyone doing the same thing.’
The system is also easy to use and flexible enough to suit pledges large and small. It is built on the premise that small individual actions can lead to long-lasting widespread change.
Visit the pledge records page to see how others have committed to patient engagement;
In addition to sharing the Pledge to Patients, FasterCures and PFMD are also collaborating to ensure the global PE community has access to a wide range of resources through the PFMD SYNaPsE platform.
Among many other functionalities, SYNaPsE – a tool for meaningful patient engagement -,  maps initiatives from around the world in an open and easily searchable database.
FasterCures is preparing to transition its Patients Count Resource Library into the SYNaPsE platform and PFMD will host the library moving forward.
‘SYNaPsE is a wonderful global resource to which we will add the robust library,’ says Dr Grossman. ‘It will become a valuable one-stop shop for the global community. By working together, we are multiplying our impact and avoiding duplication.’