Palak Desai
Dr. Palak Desai, Senior Pharmacy Management Consultant, is with the Chicago office of Milliman. She joined the firm in 2022.
Experience
Palak is a licensed pharmacist with over 20 years of experience in managed care, Medicaid, and clinical pharmacy. Her areas of expertise include pharmacy benefit management, managed Medicaid, state-mandated PDL risk analysis and implementations, pharmacy integration with mergers and acquisitions, medical drug spend, specialty pharmacy, cell / gene therapy solutions, and medical and prescription drug data analysis to provide insights and opportunities for plan sponsors, health plans, and other stakeholders. She supports client objectives with payer-perspective insights regarding formulary design to identify inefficiencies and provide insight into areas of opportunity.
Prior to joining Milliman, Palak was the Vice President of the pharmacy actuarial analytics team guiding financial initiatives as related to drug-spend across a leading national managed care organization. Her team supported a variety of internal clients focused on cost optimization, improving clinical outcomes and increasing operational efficiencies. Palak also led the pharmacy clinical team in rate advocacy, as well as legislative and policy work. She served as the Pharmacy Chairperson for the state’s Medicaid health plan association.
- Science Fiction Becomes Reality: Tracking the Future and Actual Impact of Gene Therapy. Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy, Annual Conference.
- Hypertension and Cardiac Medications, Florida Nurse Practitioner Network, Inc., Clinical Skills Workshop.
- Treatment of Osteoarthritis, Florida Nurse Practitioner Network, Inc., Clinical Skills Workshop.
- Pain Medications, Florida Nurse Practitioner Network, Inc., Clinical Skills Workshop.
- Guidelines and Treatment Modalities of Hypertension, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University-College of Pharmacy.
- A Prospective Analysis of Cost of Urinary Tract Infections in Spinal Cord Injury Patients with and without the Replacement of Indwelling Catheters.
- Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC).
- Introduction to prescription drug management strategies for cost-efficiency in Medicaid, February 2023.
- Shah PS, Cannon JM, Pachucki C. Controlling antimicrobial use and decreasing microbiological laboratory tests for urinary tract infections in spinal-cord-injury patients with chronic indwelling catheters. Am J Health Syst Pharm 2005 62: 74-77.
- Changela U, Cannon JM, Aneziokoro C, Shah PS, et al. Risk factors and mortality with Clostridium-difficile-associated diarrhea at a VA hospital. Int J Antimicrob Agents 2004 Dec;24(6):562-6.
Recognitions
- The Pharmacist Magazine Featured Alumnus, 2021.
- Illinois Association of Medicaid Health Plans Featured Executive, 2020.
- Personal Accountability Award, Health Plan of the Year, 2019.
- Registered Pharmacist, Illinois
- PharmD, University of Illinois at Chicago
- Post Doctorate Pharmacy Practice Residency
- Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy