Member Spotlight: Asheesh Sharma
Asheesh Sharma, Senior Principal, Axtria, has 13 years of experience in healthcare, technology and business consulting, mostly focused on execution of large scale processes and advanced analytics. He is known in the industry for his passion for excellence, customer satisfaction and innovation. Asheesh has been involved with PMSA since 2008, and has been a featured presenter at PMSA webinars and annual conferences.
PMSA: How many years have you been in the industry?
Asheesh Sharma: Thirteen years, with most of the time focused on commercial operations, process innovation and analytics.
PMSA: What attracted you to the field?
AS: My background is in Computer Sciences and General Management – the use of data driven analytics to support decisions or execute operations more effectively has always been exciting to me. My focus has been on scaling up innovative analytical platforms and products that would make a difference in commercial model execution. I found that the Life Sciences industry, with its ongoing changes, is a great area to bring in my contributions.
PMSA: How did you first hear about PMSA?
AS: I heard about the association through marketRx’s participation in PMSA. I continue to participate in PMSA with my current firm Axtria.
PMSA: How many years have you attended the PMSA conference?
AS: I have now attended 6-7 conferences.
PMSA: Do you have any recommendations to make PMSA more effective?
AS: I feel that PMSA’s board has always been able to structure conference agendas that are very relevant to the issues and challenges our industry faces. The conferences are a great venue for management sciences practitioners to learn from each other’s experiences, as well as from vendor best practices and innovations. It would be great if industry senior experts are invited to participate in forums that are more structured as open Q&A in smaller tracks, although I do find panels effective. Another idea could be for PMSA to have a collaborative social portal where members can post questions, discuss modeling approaches and start conversations with appropriate governance and compliance in place. These online outreach channels can complement the conferences and webinar series very nicely.
PMSA: Please describe any current projects you are excited about.
AS: My passion is Incentive Compensation and Reward Systems, and this continues to be a large part of my work today. My current projects are focused on IC designs and goal setting analytics that work better in organized customer group settings, integrated platforms that enhance IC designer’s productivity and enable better IC what-ifs, and advanced payout simulators that improve field engagement and motivation. I’m hopeful that this body of work will advance the frontier in best practices for IC.
PMSA: Do you have any predictions for the future?
AS: In our world, data is oxygen – it will continue to drive competitive advantage for firms as they react to the changing world. New sources of data will continue to expand and become mainstream, and open source specialty pharmacy data exchanges will appear. As our commercial models become more oriented around health outcomes and living services, we will see data flowing in from health devices and apps, adding to the richness of data. Big Data analytics will be in the toolkit for every management science professional. Vendors will come out with innovative subscription models for analytical apps. While this will power a better picture for brands, for Incentives we will face more issues with current models given our need to balance equity, litigation fears and complexity. However, I do feel that the current currency of sales as one of our key performance measures will continue to exist in the near future.
PMSA: What are your hobbies?
AS: I like to spend time with my family, read, and watch movies.
PMSA: Thank you for speaking with us!