Sam Kale is a vice president of product management at MMIT. He joined the company in August 2020, and leads a team that builds and support the tools that clients use to ensure patient access to treatments and therapies.
I usually lead with, ‘I build stuff.’ At MMIT, we build data into information. My team helps present that information to clients, so they can make good, informed decisions about getting their patients through care, and ultimately, to have ailments resolved so patients can get on with their lives.
My most recent background is in product management and product marketing. I was most recently with Sodexo Healthcare, Philips Healthcare and General Electric in their health care divisions. So I’ve been a health care person for pretty much my entire career in product marketing and product management.
In the product management function here at MMIT, we deal with two or three major questions. One of them is: What should we make? What helps get our clients’ jobs done better and faster? The second part is: How should we make it? The third thing is: How do we support those tools from an ongoing perspective to make sure the products are performing up to expectations?
I spend a lot of time together with my team trying to think through those three questions. There are a lot of face-to-face discussions and brainstorming sessions. And every now and again, a client will file a bug report and we’ve got to put our heads together to figure that out.
I don’t come from a software-as-a-service background. My professional background is mostly in medical devices and those types of things. It’s a bit of a different thought process, and a slightly different flow. In the first couple of months, I was learning all of our databases and processes, and how we go from data to information. That was (and still is) quite a steep learning curve for me.
One that stands out is a nice commercial win that just happened, which was a lot of fun to be a part of. The sales and commercial teams did so much hard work on that one. It was fun to be part of that process and see all of those people work.
I spend a lot of time working with my team, thinking through product requirements and planning the work that we need to do to build stuff. Also, I spend a good deal of time with our technical teams, and with the commercial side of the house as well. I’m spending more and more time with our clients to get direct feedback and input from them on some of the things we’re thinking of building, which is really nice.
Health care delivery is getting so much more complex these days, between the different types of ailments that people have, and then the treatments becoming a lot more tailored. Precision medicine is a rising theme. I think that’s an interesting space, not just from a scientific perspective, but also how it flows down through market access. It leads to complexities with coverage and how to figure out what’s covered and what’s not. And that’s a space MMIT fits into nicely, helping our clients understand and interpret those complexities.
My favorite part of the job is solving the puzzles that come with all this. A lot of what we’ve been doing recently is trying to figure out how all these interdependencies and little spider webs of puzzles get solved.
I live in the Boston area with my family. We like to hike and get outdoors and listen to the wind rustling through the trees and that type of thing.
By Lisa Gillespie