Janet Reimund
Senior Manager, Patient Engagement & Advocacy
CSL Behring
Orchestrating Patient Focus
In an industry notorious for frequent employee turnover, there’s an oasis of persistent leadership and vision: It can be found at CSL Behring, where Janet Reimund has been leading patient interactions for 20 years and where her team has been made up of many of the same people for the entirety of those years. This continuity is attributed to this teams’ passion for CSL’s patient-centric culture and experiencing first-hand the value these programs and services bring to the rare disease communities they serve.
As patient engagement has moved to the forefront in pharma over the years, Janet had the vision 20 years ago to be the first employee to advocate for the development of patient programs that addressed the need for inspirational and motivational messages to these communities. She also recognized the need to expand her team’s reach and bring in strategic partners such as Snow Companies to offer expertise in patient engagement. An example of Janet’s innovative thinking is how she brought together patients and caregivers from different disease states so that they could gain a view outside of their own group and provide inspiration to each other while learning how they each make a difference in their own communities.
Due to frequent physical and geographical limitations of the patients they serve, the patient engagement team has opened up a variety of channels for people to connect, including webinars and mentor programs, expanding the reach of CSL into patient and caregiver lives. In 2018 alone, her team and their external partners brought well over 1,000 live or mentor program touchpoints to the patient and caregiver communities across six different brands and disease categories.
But Janet and her team are also valued internally, with all of CSL Behring knowing where to turn when they have a need or a question pertaining to the patient community. Patient engagement has proven its value at CSL Behring, and “patient focus” has been added as a core CSL value in 2017. Through her dedication to this focus, Janet has risen to the top and proven her value at CSL Behring, winning the CSL Circle of Excellence in 2018.
