BioPharmaceuticals – Associate Director, Real World Data Science

Location: Barcelona (on-site)

BioPharmaceuticals Medical (BPM) ensures the best patient outcomes by providing healthcare decision-makers around the world with the evidence and confidence they need on AstraZeneca therapies and support our internal stakeholders with medical insight and expertise. BPM provides medical leadership with market participation and connectivity while also impacting the life cycle planning and execution of all our products. BPM aims to lead AstraZeneca in achieving scientific leadership, being a great place to work, and keeping patients at the core of everything we do.

BioPharmaceuticals Medical Evidence is accountable for the delivery of Global strategic studies required to generate the evidence to build the confidence on AstraZeneca therapies and additional observational research and externally-sponsored research required by Global Product Teams.

The Senior Data Scientist, Real World Data Science role reports directly to the Senior Director, RWD Science. They are expected to have a some experience with routinely collected data from healthcare settings or observational studies to provide health analytics and insights in a range of contexts including public health, pharmaceutical research and development and commercial/ payer. Alternatively, they may have strong statistical & programming skills alongside related degrees in epidemiology, medicine, molecular biology, or other health-related fields.

The Senior Data Scientist, Real World Data Science will collaborate with colleagues in epidemiology, statistics and health economics to shape the RWD science delivery of medical and payer evidence studies. They may support pharmacovigilance through contextualization with RWD. They will provide methods expertise and deliver a range of analyses of RWD to support the business and give expert scientific and technical guidance on study design, data selection and best practice in RWD utilization.

Typical Accountabilities

• Deliver/Implement advanced secondary analyses of data from EMR, claims and primary observational data required across Therapeutic Area (TA) RWE strategies.
• Provide expert scientific guidance on the application of real world evidence and observational research data to address issues and interests across the Biopharmaceuticals business units.
• Provide expert technical input, options and directions to strategic decisions made by AZ observational study teams on study design, data partner selection and best practices in RWD utilization.
• Provide support for strategic decisions on AZ Medical Evidence and Observational Research external collaborations in the US and other markets.
• Collaborate with internal teams to evaluate and assess strengths and weaknesses of external RWD sources, and potential partners for advancing the data strategy for specific therapeutic areas.
• Promote best practice in RWD Science across multiple domains, and/or stakeholder groups.

Education, Qualifications and Experience

Essential

• PhD or MS in statistics, mathematics, data science or other advanced degree in life sciences.
• Experience in at least one of the following: real-world evidence, health economics/epidemiology, health outcome modelling, EMR/Health IT, disease registries, insurance claims databases, clinical data standards, medical terminologies and ontologies, pharmacoepidemiology studies, or advanced medical statistics/machine learning.
• Ability to be a team player in multi-disciplinary data science projects.
• Proficient in SQL.
• Proficient in R/Python.

Desirable

• Hands-on experience with EMR/Health IT, disease registries, and/or insurance claims databases.
• Experience within clinical data standards, medical terminologies and controlled vocabularies used in healthcare data and ontologies (ICD9/10/SNOMED).
• Experience in supporting pharmacoepidemiology studies with proven track record of advancing approaches with statistics/machine learning/data science.
• Experience in advanced visualisation and visual analytics of routinely collected healthcare data.
• Familiarity in Statistical Analysis Plan (SAP) generation and execution for observational studies.
• Experience in the application of pharmacovigilance from RWD.
• Experience working in a global organization and delivering global solutions.