BaseCase

BaseCase helps pharmaceutical market access teams talk to payers and healthcare decision-makers. Instead of static decks or sprawling spreadsheets, they could build apps with real calculations behind them: budget impact models, cost-effectiveness tools, outcomes simulators.

It is no-code. You configure the logic, connect the data, and publish something that runs in a browser or offline on a tablet. Certara acquired BaseCase in 2019 and folded it into their market access portfolio.

Every client was a different pharma company with its own branding, data, and model. There was no single template that fit everyone. Each project meant getting familiar with the underlying logic first, usually a complex Excel file, and then figuring out how to present it in a UI that felt on-brand and made sense to someone who hadn't built it.

The models themselves were not simple. Budget impact, dosage calculators, cost-utility analyses. Getting the data visualization right mattered a lot as a bad chart choice or a misleading axis could make the whole value story fall apart.

The apps also had to hold up in the field, on tablets, sometimes without a connection. Speed and legibility under a high time pressure were key.

I used BaseCase and Sketch to design and build client apps. Most of the work was project-based: a client would hand us an Excel model and (sometimes) a brand guide, and we would turn that into a working, interactive app.

Even though we paired with health economists, it was important to know Excel well to do this job. The incoming models were often dense spreadsheets with conditional logic, lookup tables, and scenario toggles. Before deciding how to design anything, we needed to understand what the calculation actually did.