Ralph Riley is a Global Co Dx Market Access Leader with Janssen. As an FT3 member, he believes that the increased adoption of personalized medicine will create value across the entire health ecosystem
Tell us more about yourself.
I am the Global Co Dx Market Access Leader where I focus on evidence generation activities to help shape policy and payment to enable patient access to testing across all Janssen’s therapeutic areas. The Co Dx Commercial Strategy Group in Janssen supports our pharmaceutical brand initiatives intended to improve patient outcomes by leveraging a variety of precision medicine tools to screen, diagnose, monitor, or select treatments for patients. I have more than 15 years at J&J – including 6 in our device sector in our former clinical diagnostics unit with the remaining time within R&D and Global Commercial Strategy at Janssen.
What does personalized medicine mean to you?
It’s the next generation of healthcare – where the patient gets treated and not just the disease. Personalized medicine leverages technologies to use validated information by a clinician and a patient to jointly make informed and timely choices about potential decisions regarding the patient’s health and well-being. It helps to more precisely answer questions regarding whether a patient is at risk for a disease, which disease a patient may have, how serious their particular disease may be, which treatment may best serve them and how they are doing once on treatment.
Why do you believe this topic is important?
I believe there is no more profound way to create value for the system than to dramatically increase our success in improving health, and prevention plays a major role in more precise treatment of diseases too.
Why is your organization interested in participating in this multi-stakeholder collaboration?
A variety of stakeholders – especially patients – but including providers, industry (pharmaceutical, device, diagnostic, laboratory) and payers are all important. Given the structure of the marketplace, the way to align discussion and demonstration of value for each stakeholder is to leverage a collaboration to listen and work with a common purpose. This means working with trade groups and patient organizations to find common ways to achieve better patient outcomes. These approaches are not new but are invaluable when large, strategic change is in the making.
What makes this collaboration unique?
I think in how it began- and will ultimately finish. With the collaborators directly listening to patients and their desires to give direction to our work. In a way that mirrors what I think personalized medicine means to me…with the patient at the start and finish of our intentions.
What are your ultimate expectations from the project?
Enablement of the dialog between patient and provider to make the best choices for the patient across their journey… with data and evidence to support those decisions…