3. How are you and your teams pushing beyond traditional boundaries to maximize healthcare access and adherence for patients?
Katie and her grandparents at her high school graduation.
I have always been passionate about access to care, but my family’s experiences made it personal. My grandparents grew up in mining towns, where environmental exposure left them with lasting health issues, specifically cancers.
Later, my grandmother’s battle with ovarian cancer led the women in my family to be screened for the BRCA gene. These moments showed me how illness can affect whole families across generations and how critical it is to have access to screening and prevention to safeguard generations.
That perspective drives the work I lead today at Novartis. Even the most innovative treatment can only help patients if they can start on it and stay on it. That’s why transforming patient support isn’t just about improving services, it’s about fundamentally changing how patients access and experience healthcare.
For example, by integrating real-world evidence and patient feedback into our work, we’re enhancing how healthcare providers access and utilize their medical knowledge. We make available tools and resources they can use to deliver more personalized care, which can lead to improved patient outcomes. Our NPS teams also use data-driven insights in new ways to better understand and anticipate patient needs, which allows us to develop more tailored support solutions.
The impact is already clear at Novartis. Patient satisfaction is rising, and patients are able to get their first prescription at higher and higher rates. But the real measure of success is knowing that when we remove barriers, we’re not just helping individual patients, we’re helping close critical healthcare gaps and advance patient care at a much larger scale.
That’s the work I’m most proud of, and it’s how we create lasting change in healthcare—by ensuring that scientific breakthroughs consistently translate into improved patient outcomes.