Allison Perry, New York-based senior director of real-world data (RWD) engagement at Norstella, likes to solve problems.
“I truly enjoy thinking creatively with clients and helping them figure out their business and research needs,” says Perry, who was promoted to the role in August.
From a client management standpoint, she and her team support all business units within Norstella to deliver on any type of project that involves RWD, including claims, electronic medical records (EMR), and lab results.
But her work doesn’t stop at delivery. She and her team are now involved from the earliest stages of client engagement.
“We’re transitioning to a format where we’ll be involved from the pre-sales side all the way through delivery,” she says. “It’s about understanding early on what the client’s looking to do, what kinds of business or research needs they have, and how our RWD can help support that.”
Before Perry started her career in RWD, she received a master’s degree in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins, where she also completed her undergraduate degree. She then went on to complete her Ph.D. from New York University.
Her first role out of graduate school was at Boston Health Economics, which eventually became part of Norstella through acquisitions. She later worked at IBM Watson Health, a division of IBM that focused on data-driven solutions for the healthcare industry, before returning to the Norstella family as an embedded consultant within a large global pharmaceutical company. Eventually, she moved into her current position leading RWD engagement and delivery.
Given her education, Perry’s initial plan was to work directly in pharma, but something changed along the way.
“I realized I am most excited by the variety of work that can be done serving pharma—working with all sorts of different clients, big and small, across different therapeutic areas and patient populations,” she says. “The pace, variety, and diversity of the work by partnering with various life science clients is what excites me more and why I’m here.”
Her days are dynamic—and often unpredictable.
“Every day, every hour is so different. I start my day thinking I’m going to be doing one thing, and then I end it completely differently,” she says. At its core, her work is about “problem solving and being creative with our data and capabilities,” whether that means troubleshooting client challenges, collaborating with Norstella’s RWD Sales teams, Data Science, Clinical, and AI teams, or shaping data into outputs that are analytic-ready for clients.
One of her proudest projects involved helping a small biotech prepare to launch its first product for a rare disease with no diagnosis code.
“We worked with our natural language processing AI team to use machine learning on unstructured data to identify patients with this rare disease and then projected those findings to the U.S. population,” Perry says. “We found over 20,000 patients and they’re now using that data to go to payers and investors. They’ve told us they really view us as partners, and they recently extended our contract to support them following their recent drug approval.”
That project also stands out as a career highlight, she says. The client team even flew across the country to meet with her analytics consultants team in person. “It was rewarding to see our analytic consultants workshop with executive-level members of the client company and independently communicate about our data and capabilities to these leaders,” Perry says. “I was very proud.”
And deservedly so: Meeting client expectations in a fast-paced environment is a constant challenge. “All of our clients are super excited about our data. They want it curated, fit for purpose, and in their format now,” she says. “We work at a very fast pace to meet that demand, but we never want to compromise quality.”
At Norstella, Perry sees major growth opportunities ahead particularly in EMR data. “Our EMR, especially our unstructured EMR, is a huge differentiator,” she says. “We can run AI on it to understand rare diseases, patient sentiment, physician sentiment, and care team dynamics—things that have never been done with traditional claims data.” She sees oncology and rare diseases as the biggest growth areas for applying these capabilities.
Looking ahead, Allison’s focus will remain on the RWD space. “I want to be a strategic thought leader for what we need to be bringing in from a data and capability standpoint—how to make sure we’re scalable, sustainable, and at the forefront of the industry.”
When she’s not culling through data, Allison makes the most of her neighborhood in Manhattan, where she enjoys boating on the Long Island Sound, spending time with family, and perfecting her grilling skills on her NYC rooftop. She also enjoys her daily routine of 95-degree yoga sculpt classes.
Norstella’s pace and diversity of work are what keep Perry inspired. “No two days look the same,” she says. “It’s a really exciting place to be.”