Welcome to the latest edition of Synapse Connect, our way of keeping you up-to-date with the latest happenings at Synapse towers!

It has been a while since our last bulletin and as ever there’s been lots happening in our offices. We’ve been fine tuning our offerings, taken part in various events, debated the hot topics in health and set some Synapse firsts.

Happy reading…

In this issue

Roundtable for AHHA | Australian Business Week | Synapse Management Summit | Awards Gala Evening

Read on for these articles and more…

Roundtable

In September, our CEO and Founder, Margaret Faux was delighted to be part of a roundtable discussion, organised by the Australian Healthcare & Hospitals Association, that worked through various key issues and ideas to be incorporated into AHHA’s proposal for a 10-year health agreement blueprint.

Given the focus on longer‐term planning, AHHA is developing a blueprint for a 10-year health agreement that aims to be visionary, yet feasible, with clear recommendations about the steps that can be taken in the short term to achieve medium and longer‐term goals.

Participants had the opportunity to contribute their ideas while hearing from key health leaders on some of the issues for consideration. Margaret presented on the Constitutional Framework of our beloved health system in Australia and what is possible and realistic. You can read more about this here.

Synapse is proud of our growing voice with regards to health reform and we are delighted to play our part in the most important area of any society, that of health. We will keep you updated as more reform develops.

ABWI

We were delighted to recently take part in the second Australia Business Week in India (ABWI) which took place across various cities in India. The event was superbly organised by Austrade and looked to increase the growing business relations between these two fantastic countries.

Synapse was a unique representation in the delegation as we already have a wholly-owned Indian office of which we are very proud. The week, which was attended by CEO Margaret Faux, General Manager in Chennai, Hridesh Kohli and Global Business Development Consultant, Thom Soutter (pictured above), was all about raising awareness of our company, promoting an Australian success story of business in India and looking to make new connections. We are pleased to report that all of this happened and we look forward to further missions like this in the future.

ISO – we did it again

It gives us great pleasure to confirm that we have recently been successfully ISO certified for another 12 months as the standard of our internal quality management systems meet all the statutory and regulatory requirements expected of a healthcare data administrator.

This was no surprise to us but it is still nice to have it formally recognised. This represents our third year in a row and fits with our development strategy to add ISO 27001 to our security status in the coming 12 months. A special thank you to our Quality Manager, Gomathi Natchiyar, who helped facilitate the assessment from the independent adjudicators. This is a stamp of approval that is incredibly necessary in our field.

Performance

At Synapse, we bring a special focus into caring for employees and resolving their issues quickly. As you will notice from this bulletin we think of ourselves as an international family and one that supports development of our staff. As a result of this ethos, which is staunchly imbedded in the fabric of our organisation, our attrition rate is incredibly low when compared with the industry that we operate in. This is despite a period of significant growth. It’s a core competency – Synapse has invested a significant amount of time, money and energy to develop people and technology to deliver the best service and employee environment to improve employee engagement and retention. This is something that we aim to continue in 2018.

The Private Health Insurance Debate

In addition to forums like the AHHA roundtable, Margaret continues to participate in the national discourse on health reform via both her PhD on Medicare billing and various articles published in the popular media. Most recently, she wrote about the complexities of PHI financing and risk equalisation, and the potential damage that would result if so called junk health insurance policies were eliminated overnight. You can read one of these articles, which was published on Croakey.org here and there’s another on the way that we’ll share soon.

Synapse Management Summit

Pictured above (left to right):  Guru, Thom, Martha, Margaret, Lisa, Marcus Hridesh and James (Fundamental Group).

Our eagle-eyed observers will have noticed that Synapse has been steadily growing over the past few years, namely our Indian and UAE based offices. Whilst we all remain very much part of the Synapse family, this does mean that many meetings are done over Skype and quite frankly you sometimes miss that face-to-face interaction. Therefore, we have just had our first international management summit, which comprised of our seven strong management team being locked away together for two days, to discuss the future and our strategy to ensure we maintain excellent service to our most important people, YOU, our clients.

The two days were superbly facilitated by James Alvetro from Fundamental Group and left us feeling refreshed and excited for the challenges to come. We have lots of exciting opportunities in the next 12 months and feel that this exercise has left us ready to go and grasp them. Watch this space!

Close but no cigar!

Pictured above (left to right): Guru, Hridesh, Thom, Marcus, Steven, Margaret, Lisa, Anuja, Jennifer and Rodney.

In October Synapse was honoured to have been nominated for two awards (SME of the Year and Business Leader of the Year) at the fourth annual India Australia Business & Community Awards Gala evening. We dressed to impress and took a 10 strong team up to Brisbane and enjoyed a wonderful evening of inspiring stories, good cuisine and migrant entrepreneurship.

Unfortunately we didn’t quite bring home the gold to Sydney, but we certainly left with a feeling that this was the start for us and we want many more evenings like this in the future. We’d like to extend our congratulations to all the winners on the night and to Gandhi Creations for a truly spectacular evening. We’ll definitely be back!

We hope that you have enjoyed this update on our recent movements and we will be back in touch as Christmas approaches with our usual festive cheer. If you have any feedback or questions about our services, the above or healthcare systems in general please do get in touch. And our highly anticipated Synapse Christmas card is in the making. There’s been a lot of great political fodder to draw from this year.

Until then, enjoy the current Canberra citizenship chaos!

All the best,
Margaret and the Synapse team