How do you bring to life truly game-changing innovations in health, whether that means new treatments in neuroscience, for example, or a vaccine to combat a global pandemic? Well, it takes a village. And from start to finish, you’ll find market access leaders at Johnson & Johnson like Dr. Ina Rudolph spearheading the effort.
Here, she shares her perspective on what market access means, how it connects to better health outcomes—and why it's the perfect path for people who want to make a positive impact in the lives of people everywhere.
1. Defining the Role of Market Access
The role of, say, chemists, biologists and scientists in the overall drug development process seems fairly clear-cut, right?
But market access professionals, on the other hand, where do they fit in?
Ina explained: “We’re really there almost from the beginning—we start defining and building the market access strategy for new treatments at a very early point in the process.”
In other words, long before the exciting, potentially life-saving drama of a clinical trial can play out, Ina and her colleagues are there from day one. Their work involves thinking holistically about any number of different potential factors or challenges, and collaborating with a wide range of cross-functional stakeholders to deliver the desired results.
“We're heavily involved in all aspects of getting new drugs to the market," Ina elaborated. "From the outset, that means deriving the right evidence-generation strategies to create relevant outcomes for patients while also meeting the needs of payors."
Such a mission can easily start to sound abstract, but in practice you should know that at Johnson & Johnson it's fundamentally attached to Our Credo, the values guiding everything we do. Which means Ina can also frame her work in much more straightforward terms. "Our role is primarily to ensure that patients who need our therapies are able to access them," she said.
2. Teaming Up With the Best and the Brightest
Today, as a senior leader in market access, Ina holds wide-ranging responsibilities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. As a consequence, her perspective and her thinking has to remain global. "We always need to build and align all of our strategies around the fact that we're here to serve the needs of patients across many different countries and regions," she explained.
And speaking of terrain, collaborating with an amazingly diverse group of stakeholders and partners comes with it when you build your career in market access with our team: medical affairs, statisticians, economists, regulatory experts, scientists, data analysts—as well as professionals from many, many other domains.
For Ina, that was a selling point. “Diversity is specifically one of the benefits of a career in market access,” she said. “There are all of these people in my field with different competencies, different backgrounds and different perspectives, but we're all working together as a team with a shared passion. That's what makes us successful. It's both energizing and rewarding to be surrounded by such diverse and smart people from all around the globe."
3. Framing the Foundational Importance of Diversity
In fact, now that Ina has more than 16 years under her belt at Johnson & Johnson, diversity might be the through line that unites all of her work. It's something that extends to the types of challenges she's taking on, and it's what continually motivates her today.
“The challenges we’re working on are always unique, never the same,” she observed.
Ina's recent work on the COVID-19 vaccine is a case in point.
“With the vaccine roll out, we were part of something very important, even historic," she recounted, "because we knew we were helping to solve the one of the most urgent health concerns globally. More broadly, I think challenges like that are part of the reason my work in market access has never felt boring for me, why it has always been so tremendously exciting—I think that’s why I’ve stayed here for so long.”
There are opportunities to grow, explore your interests, develop professionally and continuously take on new challenges when you build your career with Johnson & Johnson that are very hard to find elsewhere.
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Apply Your Passion to Impact the Lives of People Everywhere
Market access is a unique, dynamic and fast-growing field at Johnson & Johnson, one where the best and the brightest from around the world will find abundant opportunities to make their mark—and even change the trajectory of health for humanity—when they join our team.
Are you ready to join Ina today? If so, you should start by checking out all of the roles we’re hiring for in market access right now. And in the meantime, sign up for our Global Talent Hub, too. It’s an easy way to stay in touch, learn more about life at Johnson & Johnson and even get updates about jobs that might interest you in the future.