HBA awards top honor to AstraZeneca's Harrison

Drug Store News,  May 20, 2002  by Diane West

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NEW YORK - Balance and sacrifice are key to Sarah Harrison's success, and she quickly used her post as the Healthcare Businesswomen's Association's 2002 Woman of the Year to urge others to embrace them.

"I'm often asked how I balance my life," the vice president of customer strategy integration for AstraZeneca told more than 1,800 attendees of HBA's annual WoTY luncheon May 2, "And the answer is simple. Working in a demanding career, raising a family, supporting important causes, organizations and people in our lives requires more than a juggling act; it requires a certain amount of personal sacrifice."

Harrison started her career with AstraZeneca 25 years ago as a chemist with Zeneca Agricultural Products. She moved to the pharmaceutical side in 1989 when she joined Zeneca Pharmaceuticals as group product manager of anti-infective products. Now, Harrison is responsible for developing integrated customer strategies with AZ's U.S. business partners. Harrison has been praised for her leadership and effort toward building AstraZeneca's relationships with pharmacy benefit managers and pharmacy chains.

She also has made friends and earned respect along the way. "Sarah has a drive for the pharmaceutical business that is unique, in that she really cares about her work and the people her drugs help from day to day," said Eric Sorkin, Rite Aid's executive vice president of pharmacy services. "She puts both patients and people first in decision making."

Government agencies, especially, have grown to be influential customers of big pharma, Harrison said at a news conference before the awards luncheon. "We tended to see our customers as physicians, but then we began working with managed care organizations, retail chains and all of retail," she said. "We've learned very quickly, if we're real honest about it, that we didn t work with the same amount of interest with government agencies as we did our other customers. But government is the pharmaceutical industry's biggest customer, and we now are learning, very quickly, how to work with them."

Harrison's acceptance speech focused on the pharmaceutical industry's responsibility to society and its ability to respond to change. A member of the National Political Congress of Black Women and the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, she said one of the changes the pharmaceutical industry needs to acknowledge is that "minorities are hardly the minority anymore."

She added: "The pharmaceutical industry in particular needs to think about these realities in everything we do, from the way we develop and design our clinical trials to how we market and sell our products and services. We can do our part under the larger umbrella of health care to make a difference. Make no mistake: the business implication of these demographic shifts is great. Emphasizing diversity in all of our strategies is no longer a 'nice thing to do' or 'the right thing to do,' it's a business imperative."

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