Rachel Twardowski
Director, IBD Business Insights, GIBU
Takeda Pharmaceuticals U.S.A., Inc.
Leading Change Through Reimagined Analytics
When Rachel Twardowski first joined Takeda about three years ago, she started with an analytics team of four, which eventually grew to six, and is now a cross-functional team of 15 individuals covering market research, CI, and advanced analytics across inline and pipeline products.
To ensure her team could do more than just crunch numbers, each member went through a mini version of brand training so they could think about business questions like a marketing or sales professional and then partner on key insights to support strategic business decisions. The team is also dedicated to looking at metrics in new ways. For instance, the team was one of the first to go beyond evaluating traditional market share, and now the GI brand looks at several leading indicators by building a scorecard that leverages claims data to factor in the number of indications, persistency, source of business, and market access implications, among others.
Additionally, Rachel and her team implemented the brand’s first holistic promotional marketing mix model, which has now been used for over two years. This model evaluates different marketing programs while also factoring in patient engagement, sales, and changes in market access—all to understand what verticals performed the best and how to better optimize spend. While it took months of change management for successful adoption with the cross-functional team, it eventually helped to increase brand ROI from 3.6:1 to 5.3:1 within a year.
Rachel also helped the team build an algorithm to identify earlier treatment patterns, which can be leveraged to better understand how physicians are prescribing a product and whether they are using it differently compared to competitors. She also took two previously ignored areas in terms of data and analytics—patient support programs and market access strategy—and built a way to measure changes in access over time, identify new ways to look at payer coverage performance, and determine its impact on patients.
“I love leveraging data and insights to solve strategic business decisions,” Rachel says. “As far as next roles, I want to take on a strategic marketing leadership role and to one day be a GM.”
