Strategy for accelerating uptake of innovation
Navigating healthcare system dynamics to drive patient access
Creating system wide conditions to support adoption of new technologies
The introduction of innovative therapies by pharmaceutical companies and the wider life sciences industry has significantly improved patient outcomes across all therapeutic areas, especially cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurology, vaccines, autoimmune and metabolic and rare diseases. As a result, people are living longer and healthier lives. However, successfully launching new innovations is fraught with inefficiencies and challenges associated with regulatory approval, health technology appraisal, pricing and reimbursement, clinical acceptance, and patient adoption. This journey has been further complicated by the development of increasingly targeted and complex therapies, and regulatory changes, such as conditional approvals.
Our approach
As a trusted partner to both health systems and the life sciences industry, CF supports pharma understand and navigate the path to innovation uptake. Our approach is highly collaborative and leverages our therapeutic area expertise and in-depth understanding of current pathways and processes, underpinned by healthcare system data. We work closely with clinicians, payors, health system stakeholders, patients, and regulators (MHRA and NICE) prior to launch, striving to align the needs of the health system with life sciences objectives. Our ultimate goal is to support rapid access to innovation and support the development of new services that improve patient outcomes, and support sustainable healthcare.
Our offer
Whilst we work closely with local affiliates, regional and global colleagues across the medicines life cycle, our particular emphasis is in market preparation and pre-launch, and post-launch support. We recognise that every uptake challenge is unique, which is why our offer covers the breadth of possible needs:
We collaborate with teams once pivotal studies have begun to assess existing evidence within the regulatory framework, identifying critical gaps for successful reimbursement, launch and uptake. During launch preparation, we assist with assessing any gaps in evidence and generating evidence and providing cost-effectiveness for HTAs, to help you to craft a comprehensive and data driven narrative. Leveraging our knowledge of healthcare systems, we tailor messaging to define the narrative for different stakeholders including payors, providers, clinicians and patient groups. By combining the evidence base with a clear narrative, we help you define a compelling value proposition tailored to different audiences. Our collaborative method makes sure your narrative stands out, captivating stakeholders with a story that resonates.
We work with life science companies to elucidate the uptake pathway, leveraging granular, patient-level data along with our access to clinicians to demonstrate burden of disease. Alternatively, for existing pathways, we support transformation through innovative redesigns, proposing ideal pathways and identification of barriers to uptake. This approach assists in successful implementation and decision-making for treatment maintenance, ensuring optimal outcomes. A unique characteristic of our approach is that because of our reach into health systems and providers we typically are able to access experts without paying for interviews. Clinicians are usually happy to speak to us because we are a trusted partner to health systems. This makes research faster, more honest and less costly and what others do.
Population Health Management holds great promise for health systems and life sciences companies alike to support the identification and enrolment of patients into programmes to manage their condition. It is often discussed and poorly implemented in the main, usually because the necessary patient-level data is not combined with digital interventions to target individuals at scale or the necessary workforce and resources to support delivery are not put in place. The first generation of this approach in Europe sought to do across the entire population and often failed to get off the ground because systems lacked the wherewithal to see through the clinical, workforce, data, and financial changes needed to implement. We are now seeing intense interest and growing impact from the second generation approach which is based on taking a condition by condition approach that is underpinned by data and digital and supported by life sciences. Drawing on our extensive experience in supporting the design and delivery of Population Health Management (PHM) programmes in health systems, we champion place-based care and innovation uptake through seamless Industry-health system coordination. Our established methodology integrates PHM into health systems, combining expertise in health analysis, risk stratification, and segmentation. This enables data-driven PHM implementation for targeted interventions, strategy engagement, impact quantification, incentivising innovation, and optimising clinicians’ prescribing behaviours. We leverage integrated data environments to trace clinical coding and prescribing activities across patient segments and burdens of disease, enabling insight into treatment initiation and compliance gaps. We also apply our expertise in the clinical workforce to model out the requirements for delivery and can use this to support life sciences companies in developing collaborative working agreements to support the workforce and capacity needed to deliver on these interventions. Finally, leveraging out evaluation capabilities we are able to establish from the outset mechanisms to enable monitoring progress and evaluating impact. This holistic approach enhances our ability to support health system collaboration and streamline narrative to standardise healthcare practices.
We have worked with more than 20 different rare disease areas across multiple functions including understanding the burden of disease, mapping patient pathways, improving how pathways operate, supporting the development of clinical leadership and enabling research by leveraging national datasets. We collaborate with your teams and leverage our access to patient-level data to perform advanced, systematic analytics on diverse datasets to enable re-identification of individuals with rare diseases. By harnessing electronic healthcare records and genetic data, we offer pharma valuable insights into the prevalence and characteristics of rare diseases across health systems. Our experts use their understanding of the disease landscape and stakeholder engagement across pathways to formulate a streamlined strategy to optimise uptake of truly novel innovations in patient cohorts.
The life sciences industry partners extensively with health systems across many different therapeutic areas and functions. Whilst these practices are long standing they often are relatively unfruitful—taking significant time to establish and having unclear results. The evidence suggests that this stems from multiple challenges including a lack of clarity on objectives, weak governance, insufficient resources, and the absence of the flow of data to help understand what impact is being had. We support life sciences companies to define their objectives precisely and to help find the right partners, and then mobilise enduring partnerships. We facilitate effective collaboration and partnership opportunities from local to national level to foster earlier innovation uptake for improved patient outcomes. Leveraging our extensive networks of stakeholders across health systems we identify and establish suitable partners, create engagement strategies (e.g., payor advisory boards, negotiations, and value proposition workshops), develop shared goals, joint programmes of work and documentation for effective market positioning.
We understand that the data required to demonstrate effectiveness can be complex, diverse and must be of high-quality and accuracy to demonstrate value, compliance and adherence to Value Based Agreements (VBAs). Our support includes aligning VBAs with success criteria, harmonising Industry expectations with health systems priorities, and addressing challenges in clinical or cost effectiveness through stakeholder engagement and uptake data monitoring. We are also able to support the identification of the specific measures used to guide the VBAs and put in place reporting to allow this to happen.
Our expert team
Ben Richardson
Ben Richardson
Ben leads our Data Science and Life Science practices. He focuses on supporting the uptake of innovation including access, launch, pathway transformation, and how to leverage data and digital to support improving outcomes. He is an expert in partnership development between Industry and the NHS. He has worked in oncology, cardiovascular, metaabolic, neurology and rare disease
Dr Jo Andrews
Dr Jo Andrews
Jo is our Chief Medical Officer. He is expert in facilitating clinicians around pathway changes and also in establishing provider collaboratives. He has worked in multiple areas including oncology, cardiovascular, [COMPLETE] He brings clinical and operational expertise from his role as Chief Operating Officer, Director of Strategy and Deputy Chief Executive within the NHS and 23 years as an Anaesthetist.
Dorinda Hickey
Advisor
Dorinda Hickey
Dorinda has over 15 years’ consulting experience as a market access specialist; with expertise in pharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement, healthcare policy analysis, advocacy, payer engagement and value communications.
Prior to consulting Dorinda had a long career at Novartis where she held positions in business unit and country management, including Head of Oncology and Dermatology for Novartis UK, Head of Business Intelligence and Director of Healthcare Marketing. She has broad consulting and corporate experience in market access, marketing strategy and clinical development in a variety of therapy areas including Haematology, Endocrinology, Neurology, Mental Health, Respiratory Medicine, Cardiology, Organ Transplantation and Infectious Diseases.
Dorinda has developed industry leading mass market promotional campaigns and award winning programmes in the areas of Dermatology and Sexual Health. She has an MSc in Health Economics from the London School of Economics and a PhD in Haematology from Trinity College Dublin.
Ioannis Katsoulis
Director, Life Sciences
Ioannis Katsoulis
Ioannis is Director for the CF Life Sciences practice, bringing over 12 years of experience in global market access, pricing, and health policy research, with a strong track record of delivering strategic insights across top pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Throughout his consulting career, Ioannis partnered with various functional teams to optimise the value proposition of therapies by demonstration of benefits for patients and healthcare systems.
Most recently, Ioannis served as Associate Principal at IQVIA, leading value communications and pricing engagements across therapy areas. Prior to IQVIA, he held roles of increasing responsibility at different consultancies including Evidera and ICON, where he developed health technology assessment (HTA), market access and pricing insights for medicines across their lifecycle. His work has informed evidence generation plans, launch readiness, and global market access and pricing strategy.
His expertise spans evidence generation planning and synthesis, real-world evidence studies, and strategic payer and physician key opinion leader engagements across major global markets, with a focus on the EU4 markets, the UK, US, China and Japan. His published work covers a broad range of topics on the use of real-world data for HTA and payer decision-making reflecting a commitment to advancing evidence-based policy and strategic market access for innovative therapies.
Yemi Oviosu
Senior Manager
Yemi Oviosu
Yemi is a Senior Manager with a background in technology strategy, IT operating model and organisation design and technology implementation. His experience across Life Sciences and Healthcare includes developing value propositions for digital health technologies, evaluating the implementation of AI/ML technologies in NHS Trusts and developing workforce supply and demand modelling across the NHS.
Yemi enjoys keeping fit by playing and coaching football regularly.
Neel Desai
Senior Consultant
Neel Desai
Neel is a Senior Consultant at CF who regularly utilises his pharmacist experience to support clients across the health systems and life sciences arms of CF. Neel has extensive knowledge of data, and is well versed in stakeholder engagement, project management and strategy development for the public and private sectors respectively. Neel holds a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical drug product development and a Master’s in Pharmacy, both from University College London (UCL). Neel continues to be a UK registered pharmacist.
Beena Mistry
Consultant
Beena Mistry
Madison Earle
Business Development Manager
Madison Earle
Madison is the Business Development Manager for Life Sciences. She is a Harvard University graduate with a concentration in Neuroscience and a secondary in Global Health & Health Policy.
Her role as CF will be focusing on strategic growth initiatives and partnership development.
Alisa Kamynina
Consultant
Alisa Kamynina
Alisa is a Consultant at CF, with a PhD in cardiovascular research and over a decade of expertise in life sciences. Before moving into consultancy, Alisa spent more than ten years in academia, conducting research on cardiovascular disease, hypertension, heart failure, and metabolic conditions such as obesity and diabetes. This background gives her a strong foundation in translating complex data and insights into practical solutions for healthcare challenges. Now in her consultancy role, Alisa focuses on supporting healthcare systems and life sciences organisations with evidence-based strategies. She has a particular interest in integrating research and data-driven approaches to improve patient outcomes and advance innovative therapies and care delivery.
Outside of work, Alisa enjoys rock climbing, taekwondo, and learning how to sail.
Our advisors
Haseeb Ahmad
Advisor
Haseeb Ahmad
Haseeb has over 25 years of life sciences leadership experience and a distinguished record of creating multi-billion dollar brands from primary care to rare disease, across mature and growth markets. He was most recently President for Novartis Europe having previously been President for Novartis Gene Therapies in the US. Prior to this, he was the Global Head of Value & Access and Commercial Development at Novartis and then Managing Director of Novartis UK, Ireland & Nordics. While at Novartis, Haseeb also acted as Government Advisor for Innovation Expert Group and acted as President and Chairman for ABPI prior to that. Before joining Novartis, he held a long career with MSD including country Managing Director roles in Ireland and Greece.
Throughout his career, Haseeb has built and led high-performing teams including at leading pharmaceutical companies. He is also a vocal advocate and industry ambassador for expanding access to innovative medicines.
Dr Mel Walker
Dr Mel Walker
Mel is an advisor to our Life Science practice. He has a wealth of experience in commercial launch, pipeline strategy, business development, digital health, market access, pricing, health economics, evidence generation, patient advocacy, and public affairs. He founded BioPharma Futures to support clinical stage companies in develop innovative solutions to major unmet needs, and to enhance potential for global launch, partnering or acquisition
Pinder Sahota
Life Sciences Advisor
Pinder Sahota
Pinder has over 30 years of experience in the life sciences and medical devices sector spanning the whole lifecycle from assets in phase 1/2 to post-patent management and launching brands into established markets as well as building market sectors. The experience covers Global and Regional Commercial Leadership roles as well as extensive Operational Leadership roles at a country affiliate level having worked for Novo Nordisk, Smith & Nephew, AstraZeneca, GSK and Sanofi in the UK, Switzerland, Belgium and Poland. Success in senior leadership roles has been achieved by building high performing teams and highly engaged organisational cultures.
Most recently Pinder was the UK General Manager for Novo Nordisk seeing the company through a period of high growth and launching brands in diabetes, obesity and rare diseases. During his time at Novo Nordisk, Pinder was elected as President of the ABPI and also served as Chairman of the Confederation of Business Industry’s (CBI) Health Council and their UK Competitiveness Committee.
Dr Steve Laitner
Life Sciences Advisor
Dr Steve Laitner
Steve is a General Practitioner with a Public Health and Clinical Leadership background. He was an architect of the Accountable Lead Provider model whilst working at the Department of Health, where he was also National Clinical Lead for Shared Decision Making.
His work also covers new models of care delivery such as telephone triage, referral triage, self-management support, care coordination, case management and care planning. He supports commissioners and providers to develop new programmes of care. His clinical interests include primary care, frail elderly, care planning, self-care support, GP access, patient leadership and shared decision making.
Dr Oliver Harrison
Life Sciences Advisor
Dr Oliver Harrison
Oliver is a health technology leader; he builds high-performing teams and has a unique track-record delivering business performance and driving health innovation from concept to commercialisation to multinational scale. With over two decades of experience in digital transformation, and healthcare AI, he brings a cutting-edge and mission-driven approach to addressing mental health challenges.
As an academic psychiatrist, Oliver brings deep clinical and technical knowledge, and as a Certified Public Health Expert, he prioritises data-driven strategies, and user-centred design to create impactful healthcare innovations and business success.
