Associate Director, US Market Access Insights at Merck

Associate Director, Market Access Insights

The Associate Director, Market Access Insights will lead analytical strategy and execution to assess payer landscapes, optimize access, and inform pricing and contracting decisions. This role will support the end-to-end analytics lifecyclefrom data ingestion and engineering to advanced analytics and visualizationleveraging secondary data sources (especially medical and pharmacy claims data, formulary data, and payer policy data). The ideal candidate combines strong technical skills in SQL, Python, and Power BI with deep domain expertise in U.S. market access, payer dynamics, and buy-and-bill vs. pharmacy distribution models.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute the analytics roadmap to support market access objectives (coverage, reimbursement, utilization management, patient affordability).
• Translate business questions into analytical approaches and measurable KPIs; communicate insights and scenarios to senior stakeholders.
• Develop payer segmentation, access barriers analyses (PA/ST), and impact assessments of formulary changes on demand and gross-to-net.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field (Statistics, Data Science, Economics, Health Informatics, Engineering) or related discipline; advanced degree preferred.
• 3-5 years of experience in pharmaceutical/biotech market access analytics, payer analytics, or commercial analytics.
• Proven expertise working with secondary data sources:
• Longitudinal medical and pharmacy claims data (coding systems: ICD-10, CPT/HCPCS, NDC).
• Formulary and coverage data, payer policies, UM criteria, and access restrictions (PA/ST/Tiering).
• Experience SP and Hub data
• Technical proficiency:
• Strong SQL skills for large-scale data extraction, transformation, performance tuning, and data warehousing.
• Advanced Python skills for data processing, analytics, feature engineering, and modeling.
• Expertise in Power BI
• Analytical and business acumen:
• Ability to design robust methodologies for patient segmentation, adherence/persistence, and payer impact assessments.
• Strong storytelling skills: translating complex analyses into actionable insights for executive audiences.
• Familiarity with pricing, contracting, gross-to-net, and pull-through strategies.

Required Skills:

Applied Engineering, Business Administration, Business Intelligence (BI), Commercial Analytics, Data Engineering, Data Modeling, Data Optimization, Data Science, Data Visualization, Machine Learning (ML), Market Access, Software Development, Stakeholder Engagement, Stakeholder Relationship Management

Preferred Skills:

Actionable Insights, Analytics, Claims Data, Structured Query Language (SQL)