Tell us a little bit more about your role.
Essentially, my job is to identify opportunities where MMIT can help new or existing pharma clients by providing real-world data (RWD) and evidence generation solutions. This entails pursuing the right personas across the accounts I in my territory.
Once I’ve established contact with a prospective client, we conduct discovery discussions to understand what is top of mind for them. What are their objectives, and how are they trying to achieve their goals? If we identify gaps where our data or solutions can potentially be of use, we let them know what we bring to the table and explain how we can help them meet those objectives.
After an initial pitch conversation, where we explain who we are as an organization and outline the solutions we believe might be the most useful for them, we move on to a more formal capabilities conversation.
How did you join the company? What in your background brought you to pharma?
I ended up in the healthcare industry through a lucky accident, via a professional introduction from my friend’s father, who was a clinician at Vitas Hospice, the largest hospice provider in the U.S. I landed a job working in one of Vitas’ national admissions departments called continuous care, which is 24-hour care for patients who are expected to pass within six months. Making sure that all our patients were appropriately staffed from a clinical standpoint was a demanding job.
From there, I ended up spending 12 years in the EMR space, specifically serving post-acute organizations like hospices and home health agencies that needed an EMR system to manage the patient lifecycle. My role was demonstrating how our EMR could help these potential clients with everything from referral management to visit scheduling, clinical documentation, and electronic billing. As Medicare regulations were really impacting the types of regional players I was focused on, it was hard to foresee meaningful growth in the next few years. I decided to make the switch to providing intelligence data to pharma.
What does your day-to-day usually look like?
I spend a lot of time researching my accounts and preparing for client meetings. Those can be discovery or capabilities calls, proposal meetings, closing meetings, or meetings to transition an account over to the delivery team.
I also have meetings with MMIT’s subject matter experts and engagement managers to validate that what I’m planning on presenting will resonate with the client. Connecting with the teams who have weekly or bi-weekly touchpoints with our clients helps me home in on what each client might need in the future. I also join monthly or weekly touch points with various client-facing teams to listen in and identify potential opportunities.
In addition to opening, moving and closing deals, my job involves other tasks, like reporting to leadership about forecasting expectations for the end of the month or the end of the quarter.
What are some of the larger projects you’re working on?
Recently, I’ve been working on a large deal with a pharma company that makes a curative gene editing therapy. We’re providing a real-world data trigger program for this client, which means we’ll be using unstructured data from electronic medical records (EMRs) to help them identify eligible patients and their treating providers.
We closed another large deal relatively recently, which was in the rare disease space. We provide that client with daily lab alerts, which allows their sales reps to immediately reach out to the ordering provider with appropriate brand messaging before they’ve made a prescription decision. Enabling patient and HCP identification in rare disease is pretty incredible, because historically it’s been so difficult for these manufacturers to find diagnosed and about-to-be-diagnosed patients who are an exact fit for their therapies.
Participating in deals like this helps to remind me how important our role is. It’s not just any sales job, by any means. Playing a part in helping patients get on these revolutionary therapies—therapies that are going to dramatically change their quality of life—is meaningful to me. We’re really making a change in people’s lives.
What are some of the common challenges of your role?
The first thing that comes to mind is getting clients who I’ve never spoken with before to respond. I may be convinced that one of our solutions provides exactly the kind of support that they need, but that doesn’t mean they’ll ever answer one of my dozens of emails. That can be tough, because I know we can help, but it’s so difficult to get a conversation going.
Another challenge I would say is there is never enough time to pursue every opportunity in your white space. Sometimes we’re limited by internal politics—one faction wants to take one route, and another group is set on a different route. And sometimes calendars don’t align and we miss out on an opportunity.
What’s been your career highlight to date?
Honestly, I think my career highlight has been joining this market access space four years ago, becoming part of MMIT and subsequently Norstella. I really mean that. To me, having the ability to make a bigger impact on more lives is an accomplishment in and of itself.
The pharma clients I work with are helping so many more patients with their therapies than the hospice organizations I used to support. For example, a large hospice organization might touch 1,000 patients, but that is negligible compared to what we see in pharma. Even in rare disease, patient populations are much larger. For diseases that are more common, the impact that we’re making is multiplied many times over – it’s exponential.
What trends are you seeing across the industry right now that MMIT is in a unique position to help with?
Right now, our clients are really responding to our unstructured EMR data. Our ability to deliver the most comprehensive real-world data stack in the industry—and to make that data actionable for our clients—answers so many client needs. If I want to get granular, a trend I’m seeing is the new appetite for both structured and unstructured EMR data. As one of my clients said, “EMR data is the new lab data!”
It’s tremendously helpful for so many purposes, as it allows you to bring in not only clinical events—lab values and results, recent procedures, etc.—but also physician sentiment related to the patient’s coverage, the efficacy or safety of a specific drug, the brand messaging. You can also delve into patient sentiment, if you will: the patient’s appetite for different treatment options, and how they’ve reacted to previous treatments.
Thanks to our clinical team and the technology we overlay on top of that EMR data to provide the right queries, MMIT is uniquely positioned to help manufacturers find what they’re looking for.
Which company principle resonates most with you?
As I’m in sales, I think the principle of resilience, mettle and grit resonates the most with me. You have to develop perseverance in this role and bring it to work with you on a daily basis, or you’re not going to last very long. Everyone has a bad month now and again, but what’s most important is how you behave afterwards, how you react. You need to be capable of bouncing back and moving forward with your performance over the rest of the quarter. Otherwise, you can get caught up in what occurred during that bad month, which can turn into a downward spiral if you let it consume you.
What would you tell someone just starting their career with MMIT?
That they’re very lucky to be here! It took me many years to land on an organization like MMIT. We’re making a change in people’s lives, and our data is seen as the gold standard in the industry. Knowing that I’m part of well-respected, quality organization that’s moving in the right direction is an immense relief and privilege.
Like I’ve told many of our sales development reps, there are a lot of opportunities here for career growth. It’s not going to feel like just another job, as they’re going to actually see the impact of their work play out in the real world. Patients’ lives can change tremendously thanks to what we do, and that is very rewarding.
What do you like most about working at MMIT?
I love receiving positive client feedback! I love hearing stories about the patients they’ve converted thanks to data that we’re providing them. One example relates to a recent deal in rare disease. Right after we initiated lab triggers to this organization, they were already converting patients to that drug in the first month.
For many quarters, that client had seen declines in utilization, but they didn’t know why. When they realized that their competitors were using similar RWD trigger programs to find patients, they turned to us. Receiving those stellar first-month results meant a lot to the client, as they were relieved that they would now be able to defend their brand and even restore their previous numbers. It’s extremely enjoyable when you know that your company’s data is meeting and surpassing a client’s expectations.
What do you like to do outside of work?
Honestly, I am pretty simple guy! My wife and I have a 7-year-old, so we love spending time with him. We also attend a lot of sporting events here in south Florida, especially soccer and baseball games. Go Marlins! We just adopted a sweet puppy from the Humane Society, who we named Rocket. He’s a lot of fun to play with. And when time permits, of course, we love to travel as a family to new places.
