Building a Culture of Trust and Transformation

By Molly Siegel, PAC Senior Associate

At the 2025 Patient Access Collaborative Symposium, the session led by Stephanie Schmidt and Adam Stone went far beyond technology. It was about culture—the kind that turns metrics into movement.

The foundation for the session was a powerful letter written to new access leaders about to dive into their work, titled “Collective Wisdom.” The letter was authored by the session participants via a survey and then summarized in chatGPT. In it, the group painted a vivid picture of an organization ready for transformation:

“You are joining an organization that is well-positioned for meaningful data transformation… Dashboards are regularly reviewed, data is accessible across divisions, and frontline managers actively use it to drive decisions.”

This isn’t just data visibility—it’s data fluency. But the letter was equally clear-eyed about the challenges ahead:

“Data is often siloed, definitions vary by department, and there’s no single source of truth. This undermines consistency, trust, and comparability across systems.”

To bridge this gap, the letter lays out a path forward grounded in governance, simplification, and accountability:

• Unify definitions through data governance 
• Streamline dashboards to focus on the most actionable elements
• Build routines that make data review a core management practice
  
  

It also advocates for benchmarking as a strategic tool, not just a report card:

“Use benchmarking data to tell a compelling story to executive leadership and secure buy-in for change initiatives.”

This roadmap reflects what Stephanie and Adam described during the session—access analytics as both an operational and cultural asset. Their call to action was not just to use the data, but to trust it, interpret it consistently, and embed it in leadership routines.

As the letter closes:

“With our strong foundation and your leadership, we can advance toward a future where patient access is not only managed but optimized—guided by trusted data, governed with discipline, and driven by a shared mission.”

That’s the essence of access transformation—building a culture where data doesn’t just inform strategy, it is strategy.