Wendy Short Bartie: Reputation as Currency

Three years ago, when Pharmaceutical Executive last profiled Wendy Short Bartie, she was newly installed as senior vice president and general manager of Bristol Myers Squibb’s (BMS) hematology and cell therapy business. The former public defender and veteran commercial executive was focused on translating complex science into medicines that could reach more patients, and closing frustrating gaps in treatment access.

Much has changed since then, both for Short Bartie and for the industry around her. After subsequent leadership assignments spanning U.S. oncology and hematology, including as senior vice president of oncology commercialization, she assumed the role, in June 2025, of executive vice president and chief corporate affairs officer for the global pharma giant.

The move marked a shift for Short Bartie from direct profit-and-loss (P&L) accountability to an enterprise-wide mandate. Her focus now was on steering the balance and interplay of a host of key outward-facing forces to both optimize the business and strengthen the company’s global and community imprint.

That includes syncing efforts across internal and external communications, media, corporate marketing and brand reputation, patient advocacy, corporate giving, sustainability and social impact and health equity. Today, Short Bartie also oversees the Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation, the company’s 25-plus-year-old, independent charitable organization.

The executive, in a new interview with Pharm Exec, shares that she became intrigued by the reach of the corporate affairs head position ever since serving as chief of staff to then-BMS CEO Giovanni Caforio for close to a year (starting in August 2022). Now, amid a broader biopharma industry climate of intensifying global competition, U.S.-driven policy reform and uncertainty, accelerated use of artificial intelligence and rising expectations from patients and the public, Short Bartie sees her role as less a departure from commercial leadership than as another route to creating value.

“If I really had to crystallize the transition, at the end of the day, the expectation of the enterprise is that I am ultimately building value,” she explains. “I just do it in a different way. When I was leading a commercial organization, my remit was to build value through driving P&L. Now, as the head of corporate affairs, the way I build value is really through building trust and reputation. The connection is trust to outcomes, and that’s the value that I’m able to contribute to the organization.”

A steady hand

That connection Short Bartie alludes to has become more consequential as the biopharma ecosystem confronts change at what she describes as “warp speed.” Scientific advances, the industry veteran notes, are opening new frontiers in oncology, neuroscience, immunology, cardiovascular disease and hematology. At the same time, still quite fluid and closely watched policy decisions are increasingly touching innovation and related vulnerabilities impacting areas such as market access, pricing and public confidence. The result is a business environment in which, Short Bartie acknowledges, reputation and trust, those traditionally embattled components in the collective outside view of pharma, cannot and should not be separated neatly from strategy.

“There are so many changes — a hypercompetitive industry irrespective of therapeutic area, a very dynamic external environment influenced by policy and artificial intelligence (AI), just to name a few — that have fundamentally changed the way we do business,” she tells Pharm Exec. “When those things are changing, it’s more important than ever that you are thinking about how you demonstrate enterprise-level trust and transparency, and not only protect, but build a company’s reputation during these dynamic times.”

For Short Bartie, personally, such outcomes-driven leadership begins, she says, with a simple daily test: What impact is she making on that given day, and will it “ultimately and fundamentally” leave the organization and the people it serves better going forward? To that end in corporate affairs, the answers, she notes, may emerge through media engagement, for example, that clarifies where BMS is headed, or perhaps through patient insight that influences clinical trial protocols and the materials ultimately put into patients’ hands.

The range of opportunity, Short Bartie adds, is unusually broad. The work can move from an internal communication or media interview to clinical trial recruitment, sustainability or decisions about organizations supported by the BMS Foundation. That variability is part of the appeal of her role, she says.

“Every day it’s something different, and there’s a different challenge and a different opportunity,” Short Bartie tells Pharm Exec. “It is very dynamic, but that’s actually the joy, because I’m able to touch so many different parts of our company.”

Her organizing principle in managing the complexity is connection. Serving as chief of staff taught Short Bartie how easily leaders can become absorbed in the priorities of a single function and miss the downstream effects on the rest of the business. Corporate affairs, in her view, is tasked with orchestrating all the various seams in balance — and doing so cohesively.

“As the head of corporate affairs, I really recognize it as the connective tissue across the enterprise,” she says. “We are responsible for thinking about message delivery, message consistency, transparency of messaging and how all the dots connect, even those that on the surface may feel disparate.”

To cement the point, Short Bartie recounts, with a laugh, a more biologically inspired metaphor someone once described corporate affairs as: the organization’s lymphatic system. “I thought, ‘I hate that analogy, but I get it. It makes sense,’” she says. “That’s a little pharma humor. But we really are. We’re the connectors.”

Uniting around science and sport

One visible example of that connective role arrived this past May in the form of BMS’s “Won’t Lose” campaign, launched ahead of the FIFA World Cup 2026. The multimedia effort borrowed from the spirit of urgency, resilience and global energy that events such as the World Cup typically bring to frame the less linear contest of scientific progress. Its central spot — narrated by two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup champion Ali Krieger — turned from the attempts that miss to the breakthroughs that can change everything for patients.

The campaign ran across connected television, programmatic display, streaming and digital audio, video and social media. It also carried a strong link to New Jersey, the longtime home of BMS’s global headquarters. An official New York New Jersey World Cup 2026 Host City Supporter, the drugmaker organized community collaborations and helped host the NYNJ World Cup 26 Jersey Fan Hub in the town of Harrison. The tournament, of course, culminated in Spain’s narrow 1-0 victory over Argentina in the July 19 final held at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium.

Short Bartie considers the responsibility and execution of such campaigns well beyond simply brand exercises. “Won’t Lose,” for instance, supported her argument that clear communication should help stakeholders understand both short-term decisions and long-term direction. The campaign’s patient stories and links to BMS’s core therapeutic areas — oncology, hematology, immunology, cardiovascular disease and neuroscience — served to help connect corporate identity to the work behind it. That linkage, most will agree, is a concept not always easily understandable or recognizable to outside interests or the general public. The idea that “victory must belong to patients” reflected the sports-minded mantra that persistence matters. And in the case of health care, Short Bartie reminds, it matters because patients and families are waiting, not because an organization or innovator can simply proclaim a treatment win.

That distinction also fits the executive’s view of reputation as something that should be earned through conduct and consistency rather than manufactured through messaging.

“Reputation is absolutely the business driver,” Short Bartie contends. “In today’s environment, the reputation of a company is going to directly impact a company’s ability to operate, to innovate and then ultimately, to grow. Reputation is our strongest currency. We earn that currency with integrity. We have to spend it wisely.”

For a company approaching 170 years in operation, the balance between legacy and relevance is no small consideration. Short Bartie believes trust accumulates when an organization is transparent about why it makes decisions, and accountable when it gets them wrong.

“If when you make a misstep, you are accountable for that misstep and help people understand how you address it, that’s when you’re able to watch your impact compound,” she tells Pharm Exec. “The compounding of that impact in some cases will be financial, yes, downstream. But more importantly, it’s going to be in building trust.”

Purpose is the point

Framing transparency operationally, BMS’s 2025 Impact Report, “Building a Better Future,” which Short Bartie helped steer, was released to the public back in April. It links sustainability and social impact to enterprise priorities and measurable business value, with four focus areas: science, patient health, the global workforce and environmental stewardship.

BMS reported reaching approximately 14 million patients globally in 2025, donating $174 million through corporate giving and reaching 139,700 patients in low- and middle-income countries through ASPIRE, its long-term access strategy. The BMS Foundation separately awarded 34 strategic grants valued at $22.3 million, according to the report.

Those figures sit behind the personal outcomes Short Bartie witnessed at a BMS Foundation grantee summit she attended in South Africa last year. Independently governed, the Foundation works to help strengthen health systems and access for medically underserved populations in Brazil, India, sub-Saharan Africa and the U.S.

In Kenya, the Foundation-funded Mobile Health for Mamas initiative has used community-based HPV testing and treatment to address cervical cancer, a top cause of cancer mortality among women in low-income nations. The 2025 Impact Report credits the effort with screening 37,600 people, helping 5,900 women receive treatment and care for precancerous cervical lesions and training more than 2,200 health care workers.

Short Bartie saw what those metrics mean at the individual and family level when women identified through screening came to the summit.

“Because they were identified in a timely manner, they were able to be treated, and they’re alive,” she says. “If you stop and think about that, we didn’t just help save their lives; we prevented children from being orphans. That’s the kind of generational impact that we hope to continue to advance through the corporate affairs organization.”

Sickle cell anemia is another critical disease setting Short Bartie points to when it comes to efforts to advance global health equity. According to BMS’s Impact Report, through Global HOPE, a pediatric hematology-oncology platform launched with Foundation support in 2016, more than 30,000 children with cancer and blood disorders have received care and more than 8,000 health care professionals have been trained across sub-Saharan Africa.

The program’s work underscores a disparity Short Bartie finds especially urgent: While sickle cell outcomes remain suboptimal in the U.S., many children on the African continent still die before age 5.

Back home, BMS has continued its “Standing in the Gap” program for people with multiple myeloma. As Short Bartie explains, it’s a U.S.-centered patient education initiative rooted in the recognition that efforts must target closing the distance between diagnosis, information and care. Patients, she reminds, may live for years with the incurable blood cancer and move through multiple lines and combinations of therapy.

Short Bartie stresses that the program is designed to help people understand treatment options broadly — not only BMS medicines — and arrive better prepared for conversations with their clinicians.

“We seek to empower patients to go and have conversations with their providers,” she says. “We provide tools to help facilitate those conversations, and we provide access to resources that can help them get care when they need it. Part of that is access to medicines, because innovation without access is just interesting, but it’s not practical.”

The brain health imperative

Short Bartie cites brain health as another major therapeutic bridge connecting the company’s scientific, societal and workforce agendas. BMS reentered the neuropsychiatry commercial arena through Cobenfy, approved in 2024 as the first novel drug for treating schizophrenia in adults in 30 years, and continues to pursue additional neuroscience opportunities, including in Alzheimer’s disease. In March, Short Bartie announced the company’s new partnership with the National Council for Mental Wellbeing focused on strengthening evidence-based care models within certified community behavioral clinics. The initiative launched with the publication of a white paper that addressed the value of peer support workers as a critical component in delivering better outcomes for individuals living with schizophrenia.

Short Bartie argues that the responsibility of life sciences companies cannot begin and end with a medicine or diagnosis.

“Brain health is one of the defining global health care challenges of our time,” she says. “It affects nearly every family and community, and it really does shape how people not only think, but how they feel and ultimately how they live across their entire lifespan.”

Short Bartie cites research that nearly half of all lifetime mental illness reportedly starts to manifest by the age of 14 and 75% by the age of 24. Cognitive effects are often an accompanying symptom of other serious conditions.

“This isn’t a nice-to-do. It’s a must do, and it’s a responsibility for us to really try to optimize the outcomes for all of our patients,” she says. “People are living longer, which is a really good thing, but we know with that, we will see more diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease and neurodegenerative disease, and we simply don’t have the infrastructure across the globe to address the brain health crises that are in front of us.”

For its part, BMS, Short Bartie says, is pursuing a balance of hopeful product innovation and building infrastructure to improve access (Cobenfy, for example, could be the engine to a potential psychiatry franchise; the drug may have promise in treating bipolar mania and agitation and psychosis associated with Alzheimer’s).

She also points to the inward responsibility organizations are tasked with, noting that supporting employee brain health is not merely a productivity consideration but “our proof of care,” as she describes it.

To that end, according to BMS’s Impact Report, the company expanded peer-based support last year through its global Mental Health Allies network, which grew to 500 trained allies.

“We want to have a voice in making sure that we’re addressing that entire continuum,” Short Bartie tells Pharm Exec.

AI and advocacy

Technology is another aspect of the Short Bartie-led remit to turn communication into patient impact. One example is BMS’s collaboration with Microsoft in applying AI capabilities to lung cancer screening, with the aim of improving identification of lung nodules and enabling earlier diagnosis. Despite gains generated by immunotherapy and other advances, lung cancer is still frequently found late, when it’s harder to treat.

“We believe that if we’re able to detect lung cancer earlier, it’s ultimately going to deliver better patient outcomes,” says Short Bartie on the impetus behind alliances such as the one with Microsoft. Struck early this year, the partnership deploys FDA-cleared radiology AI algorithms through Microsoft’s Precision Imaging Network, which analyzes X-ray and CT images. “This AI-driven technology is going to enhance the accuracy of identifying lung nodules, and it’s going to improve the screening process. We believe by doing so, we’re going to facilitate earlier diagnosis, and that’s going to let us intervene in a more timely way, which should significantly impact survival rates.”

The Impact Report describes a complementary Foundation-backed model in Brazil. The ProPulmão initiative combines a mobile low-dose CT unit, AI-enabled image analysis and coordinated referral pathways to bring lung cancer screening to underserved and remote communities. BMS reports that more than 2,000 people were screened during its mobile phase, with 19 lung cancer cases detected.

Together, these programs and partnerships demonstrate what Short Bartie believes can be a force multiplier effect from AI across the care continuum, including widening access to innovation.

Inside BMS, AI is already helping Short Bartie and her teams synthesize external information, identify patterns and understand sentiment more quickly. Meanwhile, Mosaic, BMS’s digital commercialization program in India, partnered with Accenture, is designed to tailor outreach to an individual physician by selecting the message, channel and timing most relevant to a treatment decision. In each case, corporate affairs has a role in making the use — and the purpose — understandable.

Trust tied to outcomes

That expectation will only intensify as policy, technology and stakeholder demands continue to converge. Short Bartie sees the health care policy environment pushing pharma away from episodic engagement and toward earlier, longer-term partnerships with policymakers, advocates and communities. Corporate affairs will work more routinely alongside government affairs to help formulate and communicate positions across audiences, including employees, investors and patients.

“Policy now is shaping innovation, it’s shaping access, it’s shaping pricing and reputation all at once,” she says. “Companies really do have to engage earlier. That part of it is changing, but the other part is really making sure that we’re sustaining systems of care.”

Concerning the latter, the larger test may become whether those relationships, messages and programs can lead to outcomes stakeholders can see and patients can feel. Short Bartie’s commercial background gives her a pragmatic lens on that question. She may no longer own a therapeutic-area P&L, but she still expects corporate affairs investments to build enterprise value, and strongly believes that access is what converts scientific possibility into practical progress.

That is the connective thread running through the programs, initiatives and partnerships mentioned, as well as Short Bartie’s evolving and own leadership story.

“Any industry requires clear, transparent and effective communication so that everyone understands direction of travel, short-term decision-making and long-term strategy,” she tells Pharm Exec. “It is the responsibility of my organization to do that for Bristol Myers Squibb. And when we do that well, at the end of the day, the people who benefit most are the patients that we’re ultimately in service of.”