We Are MMIT

As a Senior Product Manager, Laura deSouza is responsible for several data tools that refresh and feed MMIT’s market access solutions. Her team helps develop new products to help customers solve their existing problems and guide their market access strategy.

Tell us a little bit more about your role.   

At MMIT, the product team is responsible for making design and development decisions that will deliver value to customers while simultaneously providing us with a good return on our investment. We need to answer questions like what kinds of features should this new product have? How do we provide exceptional value to our customers, and how will this product differentiate us from our competitors?

In my role, I’m responsible for the process and logic behind MMIT’s nightly refresh, which uses our internal tools to pull updated market access data that is then fed into our Analytics and Landscape products, among others. We wouldn’t be able to offer a cohesive picture of market access without the nightly refresh. I’m also responsible for MMIT’s standard data feeds, a few of our custom data feeds, and the custom client fields for our brand logic, which provides the data behind solutions like FormTrak and CoverageFinder.

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

After college, I spent a few years in academia as a bench scientist in neurobiology. When I switched careers into market access, I found there were so many parallels, as the work is still about how to analyze problems and think creatively about solutions. Market access is such a niche area with so many thorny problems, which really keeps me interested! After a few years as a research analyst at Zitter Health Insights, we were acquired by MMIT.

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

I’m in daily meetings with our technology team, our developers, and fellow product owners. I’m also in regular contact with both customers and our commercial team, who often stand in as a proxy for customers and help relay their concerns and feedback. The product team is a fairly small group within the company, and we are continually receiving input from all kinds of internal and external stakeholders. We manage all of that input and then execute product development in a way that matches our larger strategy.  

My team collaborates regularly with the data operations team, which shepherds our acquisition of data and generates MMIT’s integrated data assets. When you’re working on internal tools, it’s interesting because you’re essentially solving for two problems at once: you need to generate the data needed by the team, but you also must create sustainable processes so the information is easier for people to find the next time.

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

My two largest projects right now are working on SearchLight and Source Hub. SearchLight is a customer-facing tool which will go live for early adopters this spring. The tool is geared toward market access and brand teams in pharma: it’s a repository of documents that we collect from hundreds of payer organizations, and it alerts customers when something new is published that affects market access for their brand.

Right now we’re in beta testing, and collaborating with customers has been really rewarding for me. Hearing their feedback, especially constructive feedback, has been so informative. I love it when a customer can identify the issue for us so clearly, and then we can figure out how to fix it.

The second project, Source Hub, is an internal tool that feeds into our market access data products, like SearchLight, Analytics, and others. The collection engine lands documents into Source Hub, where the data operations team updates their classification and determines where they fit into the overall market access landscape.

What are some of the common challenges of your role?

We have a lot of different stakeholders, and they have various needs and roadblocks, which must be communicated to the other groups in the language they understand. For example, with customers, I need to truly understand the details of an issue so I can translate that problem back to the developers in a way that resonates with them—and then vice versa. If there are challenges with acquiring or processing certain types of data, I need to be able to communicate those constraints back to the customer so that they understand the issues at play.

While this can be difficult, I really like the process of diving deep into an issue, because it always becomes more of a conversation. You’re continually asking, do we really understand what you’re trying to achieve? Are we making progress toward solving that for you? Nothing is instant, as we know, which means we must adopt a testing mindset. We deliver a solution, evaluate the value, and then re-evaluate our strategy based on the feedback we’re collecting—which then informs our next steps.

The other challenge of my role is that while I work closely with lots of teams, I don’t have a reporting relationship with them. You have to nurture the trust between you and the team you’re collaborating with in order to get things done, but that’s true of our customers as well. If we want them to be engaged in a beta, we’ve got to engender that trust with them, and make sure they know that we’re hearing their concerns and using their feedback.

What’s been your career highlight to date?

SourceHub and SearchLight are actually early-phase components of a larger project we’ve been working on. Essentially, the teams that work on our current production systems have been encountering lots of asks that our current architecture doesn’t support.

To fix this, we’ve designed a system to capture all of the different ways in which market access information is published, so we can have a more cohesive picture with minimal manual touchpoints along the way. The new solution uses a flexible architecture that integrates well with our other datasets, and most importantly, it can also flex to accommodate future market access evolutions. It also supports the use of AI and machine learning, which over time will help this tool act as a force multiplier for our market access experts.

So that is a long preamble, but one of my career highlights has been the design of this new solution. We’ve had lots of setbacks along the way, which have necessitated reevaluating the implementation and solutioning, but the actual design has not changed in all those iterations. That has been really cool, as it makes me proud to be able to contribute to this team.

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

One of MMIT’s unique strengths is our deep historical data, which is crucial for gaining insights when you’re marrying future-facing information, like market access, with rear-facing datasets like real-world evidence. We have a remarkable depth of data from all kinds of sources, but it’s just as important that our data goes back for a long time. It validates our analyses and provides a level of confidence in the insights we produce.

Which company principle resonates most with you?

I think integrity, truth and reality. I think that’s our job, to really shine a light on an area that is very dark and opaque. That’s how we smooth access to these therapies; we illuminate the path. I also think it’s always in our nature, our company culture, to try to be as optimistic as possible: “Of course, we can accomplish this task for you!”

It’s important to remember that while that might sound good at first, we should always be operating with truth and integrity. If we stay true to reality and report the facts of the matter with integrity, we end up building stronger relationships—even if the truth is that we can’t accomplish this task at the moment, or we can only accomplish half of it, or whatever it may be.

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

There’s so much institutional knowledge here. Your colleagues have deeply embedded expertise, so be open to learning from them. Ask questions constantly. You’ll sometimes be really surprised at those answers, but they’ll help you make the right next decision. Don’t be afraid to learn something new and adjust what you’re doing accordingly. That strategy is a good one, which often ends up being rewarded.

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

Public access to data, including market access data, is going to be really key for the next chapter of healthcare, not just in the U.S. but also worldwide. I love that I’m part of a global corporation focused on transparency. I see Norstella well-positioned to make a difference by shining a light on the often hidden world of how patients can get access to these therapies.

What do you like most about working at MMIT?

Oh, definitely the people! There are a lot of people here who truly care about making a difference, about actually making sure that a patient gets on therapy. But sometimes it’s hard to connect what we do from day-to-day with that big-picture mission. I find that the people who are the most fun to work with are motivated not just by end goals, but by the challenge of solving the smaller daily problems: helping a customer who is having an issue sifting through their emails, or helping someone complete their report. That’s important too, to care about making a difference in cumulative ways.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I’m a mom of two kids under five, so life is very physical and hands-on right now! We moved back home to be near many of my siblings and my husband’s siblings, so we have lots of family around. I love spending time together. And when I’m not running around, my absolute favorite thing to do is bake.

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