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Palak Desai, PharmD ’01 Vice President, Pharmacy Actuarial Analytics, Centene Corporation Dr. Palak Desai has 20 years of experience encompassing clinical practice, academia, and managed care. After graduating from the UIC College of Pharmacy in 2001, she completed her pharmacy practice residency with an emphasis in cardiology at the Edward Hines, Jr., VA Hospital, where her published research led to change in clinical practice. Over the years, she has received awards and recognition for her leadership and practice. Dr. Desai began her career at Mayo Clinic-Jacksonville as a cardiology clinical pharmacist serving on multiple local and national committees, including Medication Safety, Pharmacy and Therapeutics, Congestive Heart Failure, and the Mayo Clinic Foundation Cardiology Task Force. Thereafter, she returned to Illinois and shifted her career focus to managed care. After gaining pharmacy benefit management (PBM) experience at Caremark and Walgreens Health Initiatives, she served as assistance director for Illinois Medicaid Prior Authorization and clinical assistant professor at UIC. Following this, Dr. Desai held the director of pharmacy position for Illinois Medicaid and Medicare at WellCare Health Plans where she had the opportunity to create and guide a bill impacting the opioid crisis into state legislation. During this time, she also served as the pharmacy chair for the Illinois Association of Medicaid Health Plans (IAMHP) and was featured in the “Who’s Who in Medicaid.” In her current role as vice president of pharmacy actuarial analytics at Centene Corporation, Dr. Desai serves as the clinical leader within the actuarial organization, guiding financial initiatives related to medical and pharmacy spend across the organization and influencing the risk management of major developments in the industry, such as gene therapy and the COVID-19 vaccines. You’ve had success at several professional stops— how? Each position I’ve held in the course of my career has been a stepping stone for the next. My philosophy has been to never stop learning, keep challenging myself, and never get too comfortable. What is actuarial analytics, and how does a pharmacist uniquely contribute to the work? Actuarial analysts develop statistical models to analyze data in order to project future financial risks and manage financial uncertainty for a business. In the context of managed care, healthcare actuaries and clinicians collaborate to combine healthcare utilization data and clinical insight to predict the impact of future costs and trends. The pharmacist-actuary partnership is imperative in translating qualitative clinical information
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into quantitative data allowing more accurate and precise predictive modeling for future drug and drugrelated spending. What are you working on right now, and what have you learned from it? Currently, I’m very excited to have the opportunity to work on public policy addressing the industry-wide financial and management risks posed by the emergence and expected exponential growth of cell and gene therapies over the next few years. With the unknown durability of these extremely high-cost, high-impact treatments, the financial sustainability within our current healthcare payment and delivery structure will be seriously challenged. By creating a solution through legislation that distributes risk appropriately, we can not only create a resilient financial model but also ensure equitable access to these groundbreaking therapies for the right patients at the right time.
