Retail Roots, Clinical Edge

At age 22, Jane Wojcik had recently graduated from Penn State and completed a six-month AT&T retail leadership development program. In the program’s wake, her first assignment was managing an AT&T store located outside Philadelphia. To hear Wojcik tell it a bit more than a decade later, it was here that her education truly kicked into gear.

Some customers, she recalls, were skeptical that a 20-something would be able to resolve the problem that prompted them to escalate it to the store manager. Wojcik chose to view those expectations through a different lens.

“I was figuring out how to work with and motivate people, from teenagers to people in their 60s,” she explains. “When you’re in your 20s, you don’t usually get exposed to that wide range of backgrounds and experiences and cultures. You learn a lot.”

So began a professional arc that has taken Wojcik from the retail world to a crucial role within point-of-care media. Along the way she acquired a reputation as an inquisitive and creative thinker able to cut imposing challenges down to size. 

“Jane is the kind of person who has a conversation, thinks critically about how to solve the problem and, a few days later, has a well-thought-out approach to walk you through it,” says Andrew Schultz, president of PatientPoint Precision.

‘I can do this’

Wojcik grew up an animal lover in a small town north of Harrisburg, Penn., riding horses and helping to care for what she calls “the most random accumulation of pets. There were rabbits and fish and lizards and dogs and cats… My sister had two rats at one point.” While she initially hoped to become a veterinarian, her plans changed upon arriving at Penn State—where her grandfather had served decades earlier as the school’s Nittany Lion mascot.

Wojcik’s high school graduation class counted a mere 35 students in its ranks; her freshman year chemistry class alone was 600 strong. “After a few months I found myself thinking more about business and communications. It felt like I could hold on to that passion for animals and life sciences until later on,” she says.

Even then, Wojcik was no stranger to identifying an opportunity and pursuing it with gusto. During one of her college summers, she sought out a business-side internship with a Harrisburg-area newspaper, The Patriot-News, only to be told that the company offered only editorial ones. She made the case for a position in ad sales and promptly spent her summer selling space to small- and medium-sized businesses in the region.

A few years into her AT&T tenure, Wojcik applied for her first healthcare-adjacent job: a junior account executive role at a medical device firm. In her final-round interview, she was taken aback when a company exec asked, in what Wojcik remembers as “a little bit of a demeaning kind of way,” whether she felt like she had something to prove.

“I mean, I didn’t,” she says with a laugh. “They told me they thought I needed more independent B2B selling experience and maybe they were right about that, but not getting the role was a good thing in retrospect.” To that end, upon landing at AT&T reseller Spring Mobile, Wojcik was lauded as a top national performer. “That was validation. That was, ‘I can do this.’”

Wojcik arrived in pharma shortly thereafter, when Circassia Pharmaceuticals put out a call for sales reps. The listing played to Wojcik’s advantage: “They were specifically looking for people who didn’t have industry experience.” She spent the next year selling a pair of COPD products, Tudorza Pressair and Duaklir Pressair, to PCPs and pulmonologists. From there Wojcik joined AbbVie as a clinical sales rep, working on drugs that treated depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

Her time at AbbVie was eye-opening for reasons that transcended science and medicine, as her assigned territory included economically disadvantaged areas in West Philadelphia. The experience birthed in her a sense of perspective and empathy that, she says, might not previously have been part of her professional repertoire.

“Everyone should take a trip into these communities. Until you see it close-up, you can’t understand how important it is to get help for people dealing with psychiatric and substance-use disorders,” she stresses. “I have so much respect for providers who work in under-resourced areas.”

Clutter and codes

Wojcik’s entry into the media realm came when Phreesia recruited her to lead the company’s life sciences sales development group, a role on the DTC media side of the business in which she collaborated with pharma brand teams and agencies. She left to join PatientPoint as director, client solutions, in April 2024.

Her current position is an expansive one, requiring Wojcik to serve as one of PatientPoint’s primary conduits between brands and the patients and HCPs they’re targeting. It requires constant learning and research, to be interpreted in a manner that Wojcik says “goes beyond the obvious.”

By way of example, she references a fictional brand that treats bipolar disorder. “Most of the time the strategy isn’t much more than, ‘Okay, we’re going to use a code for BPD,’” she explains. “What we do is research the condition, the existing treatments, the competition… We use the data points we have at our disposal to create hyper-personalized experiences.”

Wojcik believes that, in today’s pharma media climate, the ability to cut through the clutter is an essential component of productive vendor/client relationships. “Today’s marketers crave authenticity and clarity, because they’re inundated with choices and jargon and buzzwords,” she continues. “They need help in quieting all that noise. They need someone to help them figure out what’s right but also what’s wrong.”

Wojcik hopes to continue in that kind of consultative capacity for as long as PatientPoint will have her, and remains fascinated by what she has learned about the marketing and treatment landscapes. There aren’t too many young media execs able to reference ICD-10 codes for waterskiing– and orca-related mishaps in casual conversation; there are fewer still who do so while making a positive impression on their colleagues. 

“Jane sends thank-you notes and gifts because it brings her joy. She’s incredibly thoughtful,” Schultz says.

Wojcik was recently admitted to Villanova University’s executive MBA program, which starts in the fall. Between her schooling, her PatientPoint responsibilities and her outside activities—Wojcik started riding horses again in recent years, even entering a handful of local competitions—she won’t have a whole lot of spare time on her hands. Don’t expect her to complain about it, however.

“I love what I do. I love bringing something that’s strategic and actionable to the table,” she says. “I love being that go-to person for brands trying to find the right patients.”