Maria Fotiu
President, Sites and Patients
Syneos Health
Building Better Clinical Trials
Maria Fotiu, President, Site and Patients at Syneos Health, steadfastly leads her team toward operational excellence. Driven by a mission to reimagine clinical trials, Maria has created an operating model that delivers the agile and hybrid clinical trials of the future.
With more than 25 years of clinical research experience, Maria has a unique understanding of pain points and knows what an optimal clinical trial should look like—and how to achieve better patient outcomes.
The Sites and Patients team strategically aligns country sites to unite global teams—all to improve end-to-end delivery of clinical operations. Through strategic team alignment and consistent systems, Maria’s team drives predictable delivery for sponsors, all while reducing administrative rework. Centralized oversight makes it easier for teams to manage projects. For customers, this translates to a uniform experience, efficient scalability, and more engaging processes leading to faster enrollment and on-time delivery.
Sites & Patients, under Maria’s guidance, optimizes the company’s global footprint to better connect patients and sites around the world. By leveraging the Syneos Health Patient Voice Consortium, Maria and her team have made significant strides to better support patients and improve patient outcomes, particularly among underserved and underrepresented populations.
While leading the Sites and Patients team, one of Maria’s greatest successes comes through her integration of Syneos Health umbrella companies and partners to better match patient lifestyles. Notable partnership results include a 75% reduction in oncology no-shows and a 50% reduction in ride costs. For a COVID-19 study, PatientGOTM, an in-house patient concierge service developed by U.K.-based Illingworth Research Group—a company Syneos Health acquired in 2020—sponsored safe transport to patient appointments. Results included 75% patient uptake and 100% completion of booked visits.
Under Maria’s leadership, Syneos Health Site Advocacy Groups deliver meaningful insights to drive adoption of decentralized clinical trials. This model better replicates sponsors’ internal operations, providing the ability to act locally while ensuring efficient global oversight and direction.
For customers, this has unlocked a more data-driven response for better predictability and planning, increased engagement, faster enrollment, the agility to scale, and on-time delivery.
