Acceleration and Ambition

Bill Rush, Head of US Market Access Portfolio Management, Sanofi

As the head of portfolio management at Sanofi, Bill Rush describes his job as having the responsibility of making sure that the company has the appropriate level of access for each of the innovative therapies that it’s bringing to market. This ensures that the patients who need the therapies have the best chance of being able to get them. Achieving this means that Rush must wear multiple hats at the company.

“Market access often overlaps with other functions,” he tells Pharm Exec. “We also provide support since we have a unique perspective; we look at all the vertical integrations in the market access space. It’s very typical for us to be involved in the core aspects of the day-to-day work, and we also ensure that the company has appropriate access for its therapies. We’re always working with the teams around other opportunities within the business.”

Constant change

“It's always been that way,” Rush says about the constantly changing market. “However, the acceleration of that change is even faster. To put some context on that, it comes from a lot of directions. We’re impacted by anything that’s happening legislatively around pricing, transparency, and access to therapies. We’re also impacted by any evolving business models, whether that’s by the payers themselves or vertical integration in the marketplace. We’re then also impacted by affordability programs that are out in the market. Whether that’s managing programs to ensure that the highest number of eligible patients that are appropriate for therapies can get to them or evaluating alternative models out there by vendors that create loopholes to take advantage of pharmaceutical free-good programs, every day is a new challenge.”

New level of complexity

Another element that’s had a major impact is pharma’s embracing of the digital world.

“There are a lot of different aspects of digital workflows, so there have been several different segments and spaces that I’ve worked in with digital healthcare,” says Rush. “It’s often been focused on implementing patient-facing solutions. Digitizing has also had a large impact on the way that benefit enrollments are verified and the way that payers are evaluating prior authorization forms and approvals.

“I’ve also worked on digitization around driving education to appropriate audiences, whether that’s advertising toward healthcare providers, patient education, or finding areas of unmet need in the marketplace and supporting education there,” he continues. “Everything is accelerating on digital platforms, which means the pace, overall, has picked up as well.”

Of course, AI is playing a major role in the modern digital landscape, and Rush has plenty of experience with the technology—and at a company that has declared it is “all in” on AI. According to Rush, the algorithmic-based programs are both speeding up processes and adding new layers of complexity to everything as well.

“It’s definitely sped up the process around capabilities of finding information,” he explains, “but it’s also added a level of complication because of the need to ensure accuracy and transparency in that information. So, there are some areas where AI has really helped a lot, mainly around finding data patterns at a faster cadence, whether we’re looking for opportunities in the market or around identifying at-need patient populations. The other area AI has really added a lot of value to is generating content. It allows for much faster acceleration of that process, but then the complications are still forming broader guardrails around transparency of that data or the content being generated. So, along the way, we ensure that everything is accurate and appropriate, too.”

Just under two decades ago, Rush worked as a sales representative in various roles. He then went to work for a variety of startups before returning to Sanofi and shifting his focus toward leadership roles to deliver a broader impact. He says he decided to leave the digital startup world in 2015 because he felt the market wasn’t ready yet for patient-facing digital health solutions at the time.

“This was before digital healthcare and the nomenclature digital therapeutics even existed,” he says. “The market had a lot of evolving challenges. I was forecasting out where the future was going. I thought I could gain more education from a broader market experience going back into pharmaceuticals and then went back into work with Sanofi and got a lot of diverse experiences.

“To achieve the ambition of being the first pharma company powered by AI at scale, we are pushing ahead on a triple path,” Rush continues. “In the labs, ‘expert’ AI is giving our scientists the opportunity to benefit from massive computing power, machine learning, and trained algorithms.”

Rush adds that so-called “snackable” AI is used across the organization, giving employees access to aggregate data, including procurement, manufacturing and supply, and finance—to provide greater insights for potentially improved outcomes.

“Generative AI technology is used across the totality of our activities to alleviate non-value-added tasks, improve productivity, and simplify the everyday,” he says.

The further integration of technology and pharmaceutical development is what Rush expects to push the next evolution in advancement in precision therapy and treatments. He concludes by emphasizing the importance of market access for ensuring those solutions can get to patients.