What is your role at Norstella?
Clinical Informatics Science sits with the RWD Intelligence team and is on the innovation and development side of the clinical realm. The goal is to infuse our data offerings with clinically relevant solutions, and I spend a lot of my time mapping clinical elements, consulting with the product team, and reviewing data sources, along with building out scalable processes to ensure we balance efficiency within the data structure without compromising the clinical integrity of the values.
Tell us about your real-world data expertise.
For the majority of my career, about 20 years, I was an academic researcher in the infectious diseases and cancer biology spaces, with roles ranging from education, to benchtop, to bedside research. This has translated to my unique perspective in RWD, not only as someone who loves research but also as someone who can bridge the communication gap between clinical and data elements. I joined Norstella about a year and a half ago, working on the clinical side of pre-/post-sale extract development/delivery and client engagement. During that time, I found myself developing tools to efficiently identify, analyze, and interpret information. This year, I’m excited to start a new role where driving innovation and scalability are a part of the job description.
What’s been one of the most rewarding or exciting projects that you’ve been a part of and why?
Each has their own exciting elements. The projects I find the most rewarding are the challenging ones that require diving down a rabbit hole to find a solution, or working closely with our data team to find the most efficient way to communicate information for our clients. There is a lot of work that goes into building out even our most simple data products, and as I’ve begun working more closely with our data team, I’m even more impressed with the elegant solutions they’ve built on the back end.
What does a day in the life of a real-world data analyst look like at Norstella?
The days are never actually the same. I have a running priority list for projects that need my attention that’s constantly being updated and shifted around. Typically, I sign on each morning, assess the list, and get to work on chipping away at it. For my particular role, I use a combination of computational approaches and good old fashioned manual work to assess clinical information. This means some days I may spend the whole day coding out a solution to a new puzzle, and other days I might spend all my time reading clinical notes or FDA labels. Most days have a combination of both types of work and I really enjoy that.
What types of problems does real-world data help pharma solve?
There are so many applications for our RWD I couldn’t possibly list them all, but my favorite is when we have the opportunity to help a client identify HCPs treating rare disease patients. This is where creativity really comes in, because rare disease patients are not only difficult to find in the data, but they are often misdiagnosed. Building out effective strategies so our clients can educate a targeted group of HCPs about interventions and/or clinical trials is deeply satisfying.
When you’re not analyzing data, what do you like to do?
I shared this question with a few people from my personal life and they laughed at me. Snowboarding and hanging out with my dog, Phage, are probably the answer you were expecting here. However, I am always analyzing data. I actually pull in meteorological information by API and have built an algorithm to pinpoint the weather conditions I can expect when I head out to the mountains to go snowboarding. I track all my progress and create little graphs from it to share with my family, who subsequently roll their eyes at me. I’m a very data-driven person in general.
Published Insights
NorstellaLinQ: Empowering Early Diagnosis with Real-World Data
