Behind the Scenes: A Q&A with Justin Arzt, Specialty Clinical Account Executive

Tell us about your current role and the path that brought you here. How has your career evolved since joining the organization as a PGY-1 resident?

My journey with the organization started before residency. During my second year of pharmacy school, I met the Lumicera team at a career fair and was fortunate to join the specialty pharmacy as an intern. That experience introduced me to specialty pharmacy and, more importantly, to the patients behind these incredibly complex therapies.

I loved working directly with patients, but I also became curious about the decisions happening upstream. That curiosity led me to the Navitus PGY-1 Managed Care Pharmacy Residency and eventually back to Lumicera for a PGY-2 focused on specialty pharmacy administration and leadership.

Since then, I’ve been able to work across clinical strategy, client management, specialty pharmacy operations, government programs, pharmacy automation, biosimilar research, industry relations and Clarventa. I’ve also had opportunities I never would have expected early in my career, including presenting research nationally and participating in an Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) panel. My responsibilities have changed considerably over the years, but my approach hasn’t: Keep learning, ask difficult questions and make sure the patient remains at the center of the answer.

Today, I’m bringing those experiences into my role as a Specialty Clinical Account Executive at Lumicera.

Looking back at your residency experience, what initially attracted you to Navitus and Lumicera?

The business model made sense to me as a pharmacist. Navitus was built around transparency and aligning the pharmacy benefit with the interests of the client and member, while Lumicera brought a similar philosophy to specialty pharmacy through its cost-plus model.

As I learned more about managed care, I realized how much influence pharmacists can have beyond an individual prescription. A formulary decision, network strategy or contracting decision can affect thousands of people at once.

I wanted to learn how those decisions were made while working somewhere that was willing to challenge traditional approaches to drug pricing. Navitus and Lumicera gave me that opportunity.

Your research on Humira-to-biosimilar transitions was recently published in Pharmacy Times. What sparked your interest in this topic?

During my time as a clinical intern at Lumicera, I had conversations with thousands of patients living with chronic and often life-changing conditions. Those direct perspectives stick with you. When I transitioned into managed care, my work naturally became much more population based. Suddenly you’re looking at utilization, spending, adherence and outcomes across thousands or millions of claims. Those measures are important, but I did not want the person represented by each data point to disappear. That became the motivation behind the biosimilar research.

There was already tremendous interest in how much money biosimilars could save the health care system. I wanted to ask the other half of the question: What actually happens to the patient when we make that change? We intentionally looked beyond utilization and savings to examine treatment continuity, patient satisfaction, adverse events, out-of-pocket costs, therapy changes and the work pharmacists performed throughout the transition. If we’re going to make population-level decisions, I believe we have an obligation to measure their impact at the patient level, too.

How did your experience as a resident shape the way you approached your study designs and data analysis?

Residency taught me to look at a problem from several perspectives before deciding what success actually means. If our study on Humira-to-biosimilar transitions had only measured biosimilar utilization, we could have declared success as soon as the prescriptions changed. If we had only measured savings, we might have missed treatment interruptions or patient dissatisfaction. And if we had only looked at clinical outcomes, we would have missed an important affordability story. So, we intentionally evaluated utilization, persistence, treatment gaps, alternative therapy use, patient satisfaction, adverse events, out-of-pocket costs and plan impact together. That comprehensive approach reflects one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in managed care: One metric rarely tells the entire story.

Why is biosimilar adoption such an important issue for patients, payers and the health care industry right now?

Biosimilars give us an opportunity to introduce meaningful competition while maintaining the clinical value patients depend on. For health plans, that can mean substantially lower drug spending. For the health care system, competition can help make biologic therapy more sustainable. But the opportunity I’m most interested in is what happens when those savings reach beyond the plan.

Lower costs only represent true progress if patients can continue accessing the treatment they need. That’s why benefit design matters so much.

What our research demonstrated is that we don’t necessarily have to choose between affordability and patient experience. A thoughtfully designed biosimilar strategy can lower costs while maintaining high satisfaction and treatment persistence.

Are there any future projects or areas of specialty pharmacy that particularly excite you right now?

I’m especially interested in studying what happens after a specialty strategy is implemented. We’ve continued exploring real-world biosimilar outcomes with newer products such as ustekinumab, and I’m increasingly interested in the operational side of these transitions as well — how many patient and provider interactions are required, how much pharmacist time is involved, what creates treatment delays and how we can design processes that make transitions easier for everyone involved.

I’m also excited by the broader innovation happening across Lumicera, Navitus and Clarventa. Specialty pharmacy is evolving quickly, and there is a tremendous opportunity to combine transparent pricing, thoughtful network design, better technology and stronger clinical data. Technology and analytics can help us work at scale, but I never want efficiency to come at the expense of the human side of pharmacy. The goal should be to use those tools to give pharmacists more opportunity to focus on the patients who need us most.

As someone who started as a PGY-1 resident and now has published research influencing industry conversations, what does this accomplishment mean to you personally, and what message would you share with current pharmacy residents considering a career at Navitus?

It’s incredibly meaningful, but I view it much more as a team accomplishment than an individual one. When I started residency, I certainly wasn’t thinking that a research question would eventually lead to national conference presentations, an AMCP panel and publication. I was fortunate to have mentors who gave me the freedom to ask questions, challenged my assumptions and trusted me with meaningful work. I’m also grateful to the pharmacists and patient-care teams whose work made these outcomes possible. Research can quantify what happened, but there are real people behind every successful transition.

For residents considering Navitus, I would encourage them to stay curious and take advantage of the breadth of opportunities here. Most importantly, don’t lose sight of the patient as your work becomes more strategic.

Managed care gives pharmacists the unique opportunity to improve care for entire populations. With that scale comes a responsibility to remember that every claim, every utilization statistic and every dollar of drug spend ultimately represents a person trusting the health care system to work for them. That’s something I hope to carry with me throughout my career.

Learn More

Get a closer look at Justin’s research in his article on Pharmacy Times, and take a few minutes to learn more about the residency program offered by Navitus.