We Are MMIT

After starting at MMIT as an intern, Carly Nicholas is now a senior analyst on the Indices team. She conducts primary research with payers, physicians, and practice managers and creates monthly syndicated reports to highlight key findings. Indices reports focus on industry trends, access changes and deep dives into specific therapeutic areas.

Tell us a little bit more about your role.   

I work on our Index team, which is responsible for creating syndicated reports for clients on various therapeutic areas and access management topics. I also create reports for our Market Event Primer product, which allows us to go beyond our usual Biologics & Injectables and Oncology Index topic areas to include more current events.

Our Market Event Primer reports are monthly, and they have a much faster turnaround time than our full Indices reports because the sample size is smaller; we usually limit these surveys to 20 payers. But we’ve also expanded our MEP surveys to include other stakeholders, such as IDNs and employee benefit managers, if they can speak to the topic we’re interested in.               

How did you join the company? What in your background brought you to pharma?

I first heard about MMIT during a career fair at my college. Although I didn’t have a background in pharma, I studied marketing and psychology. Within all my psychology classes, I was consistently learning about different drugs, which exposed me to concepts like mechanism of action, classes of drugs, and just other nuances within the field. I became an intern in April 2021, and joined full-time just a few months later.

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

The Indices reports are very cyclical. I have the same process for each report, which takes about a month from start to end. At the beginning, I learn which topics I’ll be reporting on. Sometimes this will be a therapeutic area, such as diabetes or breast cancer, and sometimes it will be a general market access management topic, such as sites of care. Most recently, I’ve been working on a report about federal price negotiations.

I’ll then do extensive research on my topic. If it’s a therapeutic area, I’ll research all the drugs that are currently in the market, and I’ll look to see which drugs are going to be approved soon. Then, when I’m writing the survey, I plug my research into our standard questions to make them more applicable. For example, when we ask physicians about their prescribing habits for certain drugs, I’ll be sure to include every product in that TA, including the newly launched ones.

We also try to ensure we include any relevant news, overarching trends, or recent changes related to that space. For example, if there’s a wave of new biosimilars within a certain treatment area, I’ll include questions on how payers expect to manage their formularies based on those new market entrants. Once we field our surveys and get all the responses we need, then I work on creating clean, clear reports that highlight all of the key data points.

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

Right now I’m helping to create a user interface tool to add value to our Indices reports. Our technology team is doing the programming, and I assist by making sure they have and understand all our data so they can incorporate it into the UI tool. When we’re finished, our clients will be able to filter the data based on their selections. For example, a client could choose to see only responses from large national payers. As this UI tool is much more interactive than our standard reports, it will give clients the ability to configure the data to their specifications and focus on their target demographic.

What are some of the common challenges of your role?

Timing is everything with the Index, because our reports are meant to be delivered on a monthly cadence. Sometimes it can be challenging to reach our response quota for a particular survey, which then can delay the report building process. When that happens, we have to shift our priorities in order to get everything done on time.

It’s also important to write unbiased questions, which do not lead or guide the respondents to answer in a certain way. Even if we suspect that we know how the majority of respondents will answer the question, we must be careful to word it in an objective, straightforward manner.

What’s been your career highlight to date?

In March 2024, an article published in The Economist used data from a Market Event Primer report that I worked on, which was about AI early detection. That was a really timely topic as AI is becoming such a driver in the industry, but it was pretty cool to see that data picked up by a mainstream publication.

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

In market access, so much of the focus is now on real-world data. Usually that term is used to refer to datasets like lab data and unstructured EMR data, but the real-world quality of our market research is similarly valuable to clients. My team conducts primary research with payers, physicians, and practice managers, and the responses we get back are recorded verbatim.

During the survey writing process, we sometimes offer clients the opportunity to contribute specific questions that they’d like us to ask our panel of respondents. This especially goes for our Rapid Response reports, because those are a custom product. But even with our syndicated Indices reports, clients will sometimes let us know what they’re hoping to learn about from the report.

The data we provides reveals what payers and other stakeholders really think about the market trends and events that are happening right now, which is another kind of real-world data.

Which company principle resonates most with you?

I’d have to say kindness, empathy and grace. Morale is such a huge factor in productivity. The moments where we can just be humans with each other make all the difference. My direct team is relatively small, and we collaborate a lot to complete tasks when there’s a time crunch. There are always times when each of us just have too much on our plate, but we know that our team is willing to step up when needed to offer support and assistance. That has a huge impact!

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

It’s okay if you don’t know everything about pharma and healthcare as soon as you start. There was definitely a bit of a learning curve for me because my background is in marketing and psychology, but I picked things up over time. It can be intimidating at first, when you’re sitting in meetings and hearing acronyms you’ve never heard before thrown around, but just keep asking questions of your team. We never stop learning, as there’s always something new to dive into in this field!

What do you like most about working at MMIT?

The people are fantastic! I’ve worked on the same team my whole career at MMIT. We’re scattered around the country, and we all work remotely. Although I’ve never met most of my teammates in person, it feels like we have. We’re very collaborative, and everyone is always willing to lend a hand, as am I.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I live in Washington, D.C., which is such a fun city with so much history. I moved here in 2021, and I still haven’t run out of things to do—I’ve just been exploring as much as I can. One of the best things about the city is that most of the museums are free. The National Mall is lined with museums on both sides, from the Smithsonian museums to art museums. I take advantage of them whenever possible!  

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