Tell us a little bit more about your role.
My role is to lead the overall partnership between MMIT and our largest, most complex customers. The pharmaceutical and biotech clients I work with have large brand portfolios spanning multiple therapeutic areas, each with many stakeholders. While all clients are supported by an MMIT client success team, only MMIT’s largest enterprise clients have a VP of Client Partnership as an aligned leadership role.
In this position, I’m also the point person for renewals and retention, and handle the contracting that accompanies that. I also serve as a point of escalation if any issues happen to arise. Most importantly, I am here to ensure that our largest customers realize measurable value with the service and data we’re providing across the board.
How did you join the company? What in your background brought you to pharma?
My career started in corporate finance and business systems with KPMG, and then transitioned into pharma over 20 years ago. My very first pharma role was a consulting project with Johnson & Johnson back in 2004. Later in my career, I earned an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. I was at Genentech for eight years, in various roles, and then joined and helped scale a patient services data startup, working with Oncology and Rare Disease pharma companies bringing their first therapy to market. I worked alongside MMIT on many of those launches, which led me to MMIT about three years ago.
What does your day-to-day usually look like?
The majority of my work is based on listening, understanding, and strengthening relationships with our customers. It varies from day to day, but most of my work falls under the umbrella of client engagement. I make sure that MMIT is aligned with our client’s goals and that we understand their focus areas and growth strategies. I am also keeping close with our internal legal and finance teams to ensure that all of our contracts and renewals are progressing as planned.
Internally, I meet regularly with other MMIT client, product, and delivery teams to review our customer strategy and outlook. I help ensure that we all understand where clients may be experiencing friction and work to smooth that however we can. I’m often asking our team, “what’s working well for our clients? Where can we do more of what is working best?” I step in wherever I can to be an advocate for what our customers need, and to help advocate for what our MMIT teams need to be the best in the industry.
What are some of the larger projects you’re working on?
One larger project that I’m working on now is coordinating in-person Innovation Day summits with my clients, which takes a lot of synchronization to align priorities, senior leadership, and focus areas for everyone involved. In order to make these onsite, multi-day visits come to life, there are lots of moving pieces. We are always excited to share MMIT and Norstella’s innovation roadmap, and to bring together vendors who are all working for the same customer to discuss how we can better partner with one another.
For these Innovation Days, we want our customers to share what they’re trying to build in the next year, so we can determine how to best support those goals. It’s all very forward-looking. Afterwards, we have internal strategic review sessions where we ensure that everything we’re doing at MMIT is helping our customers succeed.
Another larger project is liaising with Norstella’s Product team to ensure that our newest and most promising solutions are shared with our customers. Oftentimes, these early-access projects may be complex to roll out; despite the complexity, I believe we get significantly deeper and valuable feedback from our largest customers, because they’re evaluating the beta release from many more angles.
What are some of the common challenges of your role?
One of the biggest challenges is also a central part of my role, which is the contract negotiations and renewal process. Typically, these large enterprise discussions about all of the ins and outs of the overall licensing agreements can be very complex and nuanced, and often extend for weeks (and sometimes months).
It is not always easy to ensure that we have a balance between what creates value for our customer—all these products and services, with terms that help them succeed—and terms that protect us as a company and allow MMIT to innovate and invest in our future. It can be a very fine line to walk, striking a balance of where we can flex and be good partners. At the end of the day, ensuring that our partnership continues and sets us all up for success and growth is our biggest goal.
The other challenge is just the virtual nature of work these days. Very few of our customers have gone fully back into the office after COVID. It can be challenging to make the most of my presence and nurture those relationships virtually. It’s always going to be easier to do this job in person, but I try to overcome the virtual aspect of my presence by being accountable and having the utmost integrity. I would love to be onsite with all of our customers five days a week, but even if they were all co-located, that would be hard to make a reality. So you have to do your best with what you have.
What’s been your career highlight to date?
My career highlight is the same moment, but I’ve been immensely fortunate to have many of these moments throughout my career being a part of new drug launches. When I see or hear the phrase “first patient in” following a new drug launch, I’m absolutely walking on air, knowing the hope this will bring to so many. Hands down that is the biggest career highlight. Those moments have been my motivation for my entire career.
Whenever you get to be part of a new therapy coming to market, you get a front row seat to see a new pathway opening up for patients. . . I will run through brick walls for that. Knowing that the work that I do can eventually help a patient to get access to a treatment today that they didn’t have yesterday, that is very meaningful to me.
My Mom, Dad, and stepmother are all alive today because of oncology therapies and advancements in medicine that have been brought to market. I am forever grateful for the thousands of people that worked tirelessly over decades to make those therapies possible, and my hope is that my work will do the same for future families and patients.
What trends are you seeing across the industry that MMIT is in a unique position to help with?
In the past couple of years, we’ve seen unprecedented levels of uncertainty around payer and PBM behavior, especially with the dismantling of ACIP. Whereas before we saw a decade or more of consolidation, now we’re seeing a big shift toward decentralization, eroding the strength of PBMs.
As a result of that shift, I’d say that MMIT is uniquely well-positioned to guide our clients, as we’re the recognized payer subject matter experts in the industry. We not only have direct relationships with payers, providers, and P&T decision makers, but we also have the technology to illuminate and quantify pharma’s uncertainty about payer behavior. We will have unique insights into every new payer shift and trend—which are invaluable to our pharma customers.
Which company principle resonates most with you?
Definitely integrity, truth, and reality. Customers rely on us for our subject matter expertise, for the rigor and dependability of our data. Our integrity shows up in how we formulate our data, but it also shows up in how we interact with our customers: how we prepare for meetings, how we are truthful and genuine, how we ensure accountability. In a way, we embody the data that we sell, as our personal integrity reflects the integrity that goes into our policy and restriction data, our presentation and readouts, the panels we curate, all of it.
What would you tell someone just starting their career with MMIT?
When I was early in my career, my mentor John Bridges had a sign above his office door, and it is the best piece of advice for anybody joining a new organization. It said, “Do what you say you will do.” Practicing that maxim will help to instill self-awareness, compassion, and accountability, and it will help you forge great relationships. Being able to foster that sense of trust and accountability with your peers and stakeholders will open doors for you like nothing else.
Just imagine: what would your manager do if they knew that every time they saw your hand go up, you were going to deliver whatever you said you would? It could be a two-second thing or a two-month thing, but if they know they can count on you, you will have the foundation for the most promising career as a servant leader.
What do you like most about working at MMIT?
I love the history of our long-term commitment to the payer space, all the way back to printed formulary reference books! Our expertise has allowed us to be the market leader, to innovate and invest in new technology because we have done this one thing so incredibly well over such a long period of time. We have demonstrated to the market that MMIT is the gold standard for payer data, which has enabled us to build so many other solutions on top and create an impressive infrastructure for growth.
What do you like to do outside of work?
My biggest pastime is being the best amateur / professional-ish dad and husband that I possibly can be to my kids and wife. I am also an avid golfer and photographer, and my work has been featured in advertisements, magazines, book covers, and television. I’ve gotten close to dipping my toe in it full-time, but I’ve always kept my day job. You can see my work at JasonRodmanPhotography.com.
