We Are MMIT

As a senior consultant on MMIT’s Advisory Services team, Andrew Rouff is responsible for ensuring clients realize the full value of their market access solutions. He conducts and presents syndicated and custom market research, and collaborates internally to ensure clients achieve their goals.

Tell us a little bit more about your role.         

As a senior consultant on the Advisory Services team, my job is to make sure that our clients get the most out of their market research subscriptions. There are five of us on the team, which is part of the broader Advisory and Insights group. We own client interactions for several subscription- based products, including Message Monitor, Index, PAR Insights, Pulse, Engage, Rapid Response, and Strategic Launch Report.

How did you join the company? What brought you to pharma? 

I’ve been in pharma for my entire career. I’m a scientist by training; I studied biochemistry and bioengineering for my undergraduate and graduate degrees. After grad school, I worked at a pharmaceutical consulting company as an innovation consultant, helping companies explore new products, technologies, business models, and ways to innovate. In that role, I touched on many different functions, from clinical development to marketing to patient advocacy, but I enjoyed market access most.

I next moved on to a market access agency, where I provided full-service, end-to-end support for various brands. I conducted market research, tracked coverage uptake, developed marketing materials, ran ad-boards, and participated in multiple launches. I learned the importance of market access data first-hand and I wanted to know more about how that data is collected, developed and distributed, which is what led me to MMIT.

What does your day-to-day usually look like? 

One great part of the job is that every day is different! On a typical day, I’ll present a client readout and prep for upcoming readouts. I’ll have check-ins with client teams and discuss ongoing workstreams with the broader MMIT team. We have weekly advisory meetings to talk about key trends and learn best practices from each other, which helps us cross-fertilize and understand different therapeutic areas. I also help run MMIT’s thought leadership program, so I may be reviewing a blog or an article, or consulting with one of our writers. 

What are some of the larger projects you’re working on?

I’m currently working with several pharma companies to track coverage following their launches. This involves coordinating with clients on coverage details, looping with internal teams to track and pull the data, and then presenting these coverage reports to our clients and their senior leadership teams.

I’m also working on numerous Message Monitor reports, which involve tracking non-prompted insights from payers regarding their recent manufacturer meetings and presenting these reports to our clients. Clients are often surprised at what they hear, and need to modify their market access strategies accordingly.

What are some of the common challenges of your role? 

The main challenge is also what I enjoy the most, which is the art of learning new information quickly. I have a lot of clients in a lot of different therapeutic areas, and when I get a new one, I need to do research so I can learn the competitive dynamics involved in that area. What brands are in the market basket? What are the nuances of the client’s drug? What does the pipeline look like? What are payers preferring?

A big part of the role is doing your own research to make sure you understand exactly what you’re talking about. Thought leadership is also excellent for that, because it forces me to stay up to date on what’s going on. Then, if a client brings up a topic, I can speak to it in an educated manner and ask relevant questions. That makes for much better engagement with clients overall.

What’s been your career highlight to date? 

Actually, I’d have to say being a part of MMIT’s thought leadership program! It’s not my full-time job by any means, but it’s very rewarding to see all these pieces published. It’s satisfying to work behind the scenes to help members of our advisory team think through their position on some of these complicated trends.

When we participate in a larger conversation on the role of copay accumulators, for example, we’re connecting with other industry players and helping to clarify these topics for our clients. It’s also satisfying to see my name in print, to be quoted by reporters and editors, and have some of those conversations result in new business for us.

What industry trends are you seeing right now that MMIT is in a unique position to help with? 

Well, we’re still monitoring the various impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is top of mind for a lot of our clients. There’s also renewed scrutiny on the business practices of large, vertically integrated payers/PBMs, which may intensify as more payers partner with manufacturers to commercialize biosimilars and then prefer their own, white-labeled products. And we’re also a year into the resumption of Medicaid redeterminations, which means that pharma companies need to figure out whether patients can still access their therapies if they’re now uninsured or on a health insurance exchange plan.

At MMIT, our market research is uniquely situated to help our clients stay ahead of these market shifts. For example, the goal of our Indices product is to solicit stakeholder feedback on key trends. We ask payers, HCPs and practice managers their thoughts on a particular topic—let’s say the IRA’s out-of-pocket spending cap—and we analyze the data to present to clients in syndicated reports. How are payers planning to respond? How are providers dealing with this?

Of course, we also have custom market research solutions which let us tailor our research to deliver the precise information clients are looking for. Our Rapid Response product enables qualitative and quantitative feedback on any topic our client wants, including IRA, coverage concerns, and/or feedback on brand-specific stimuli. Those are just a few ways that our research provides clients with advance insights into emerging trends.

Which company principle resonates most with you? 

I would say humility, gratitude, and learning. While our clients are typically experts in just one therapeutic area, we are responsible for dozens of areas, so we have to learn very quickly in order to speak on their level. While I do love learning, I also have to embrace humility, as there’s so much I don’t know! Gratitude is important because you should always remember to be grateful for the assistance you get from others. We are fortunate to have such a great team.

What would you tell someone just starting their career with MMIT?

Make sure to ask for help, especially in the beginning. Understanding how all the different internal teams work together can be complicated, but is crucial given the high degree of collaboration required for our work. MMIT is very process-oriented and provides a great roadmap of what your first month will look like, including tons of meetings in the first few weeks. Come into those ready to listen and understand the lay of the land, and do the research so you have a fundamental knowledge of how your role functions and intersects with other teams.

Where do you see Norstella in the next year or two? 

One of our current priorities is embracing real-world data across the product life cycle. In addition to integrated offerings like Patient Access Analytics, which combines payer coverage, claims, lab and pathways data, we’re also incorporating claims data into some of our Insights offerings like our Strategic Launch Report, which helps clients project coverage uptake via selected analogs.

We’ll also continue to innovate our products. One example involves moving MMIT Indices—our product that gathers payer, HCP, and practice manager feedback on key market access trends—to an online module. We’ll be able to create custom dashboards so clients can follow a wide variety of trends. We’ll keep reimagining how our clients interact with our research, so they can tailor the insights they receive to meet their needs.

What do you like most about working at MMIT? 

Market access is complex. In this field you’re always learning, which is both challenging and immensely rewarding. As I’m a scientist by heart, I love the quantitative and qualitative nature of the research we do. There are a lot of different payers out there, and different books of business that are always changing. In competitive therapeutic areas, we have to learn how to help clients differentiate their brand and communicate their value to payers and providers. It’s a business-oriented, process-oriented job with a lot of research, which I really like.

Whether it’s exploring a new therapeutic area or writing a new thought leadership piece, at first it’s hard to dive in. Where do I even start? But by the end, I’m proud of what I’ve learned and what we’ve done with that knowledge. The more research I do, the more it shows on client presentations—I can really see the fruit of my labor. We all have a lot to learn in market access, and I love making progress in that direction!

What do you like to do outside of work? 

I’ve always enjoyed watching and playing sports. I snowboard and play soccer, tennis, and basketball, and I always support my hometown Detroit teams – go Lions! My wife and I are new homeowners with a two-year-old daughter and a dog, so I spend most of my time taking care of the house and doing fun family activities together.

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