The PharmaBrands Podcast
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The PharmaBrands Podcast
Tim Rice, CEO of The Rounds, on the Journey to Build, and Evolve a Unique Educational Platform for Canadian HCP’s
According a recent whitepaper published by The Rounds, 74% of HCPs want to go to an independent medical site to get practice and product information. In this episode host Neil Follett talks with Tim Rice about his journey to lead, build and grow a compliant and innovative platform for Canadian HCPs.
This episode was brought to you, in part, by NFA Health, a creative marketing agency born out of a desire to make healthcare experiences better. We appreciate their support and encourage you to learn more at, nfahealth.com.
Our producer is Darryl Webster with Chess Originals.
Yeah, my name is Tim Rice and I'm the CEO for the Rounds.
Speaker 2:Good morning Tim. Happy to have you on the show. Thanks for taking the time today.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I'm really happy to be here and congrats on all the success in launching your company.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Yeah, it's been a really it's been an exciting year and that's actually a great segue because you've just handed me the. Let's talk about starting your company line. I want to chat about a whole bunch of stuff. This could be sort of three episodes in one. We've got sort of your entrepreneurial journey. I want to talk about the rounds as a business and a platform. You have a really interesting, I think, lens into what the sort of mood and the trends are kind of within the healthcare industry, because you're seeing it really quite multidimensionally. So I want to get into that a little bit. But let's start with you, maybe introduce yourself a little bit to folks and talk about kind of where this journey with the rounds started?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it started back in 1999, believe it or not. I was in university and I had two years left and I ended up meeting a local pharma sales manager and she saw something that she felt that she could tap into, of like leading me down the direction of where I might want to go with my career when I finished school and she kind of groomed me, gave me some advice and I took some business courses as some electives and then I went to Tip Top Tailors and learned how to sell suits, because one of the things that was really important of getting into pharma was learning how to sell, and Tip Top Tailors actually had a sales training program. So that actually led me into getting into the pharma world about two months after I graduated from university, which was really lucky back in the day, but back then we had a lot of reps in the field, so it was kind of the hiring frenzy at the moment.
Speaker 2:So this would have been sort of like 2001?
Speaker 1:2001, yep, and so I started carrying the bag for Novartis back in 2001. But as soon as I got there I really wanted to grow my career within the organization. I saw an opportunity that there was ways to get promoted and I really felt that if I did a good job in what I was doing, networked really well, listened really well and kind of grew within the roles, that I could keep on growing within that organization. And Novartis was a great grooming ground. They were very supportive of ongoing development and I grew my career. So I was with Novartis for 16 years, had various roles, lived in various provinces, did stuff within the sales organization, within the medical education organization, within brand management, and then moved into leadership roles in the sales side of the business. So it was kind of a really great way of growing a career and understanding the business from multiple angles.
Speaker 1:But I would say what turned for me was we were really struggling in the field my last few years when I was out with my reps of trying to get in to see physicians.
Speaker 1:The access was changing and we weren't even at the high volumes of reps that we were like back in 2001, 2002, 2003. So it was really challenging to know that we had fewer people in the field trying to access these physicians and that access was still going away. And you know, we would host a lot of educational dinners and it was hard to get physicians and HCPs out to these dinners dinners and it was hard to get physicians and HCPs out to these dinners and I really felt that there had to be a shift in the market. But I didn't really know what else was out there. I was pretty involved with everything that Novartis did and we had this big charity ride from Toronto to Montreal on our bicycles every year and I was actually driving back from Montreal from that charity ride and there was a local CEO here in the city that was on the board for the rounds and I didn't know that at the time but he said listen, I'm taking my dog out for poop and I thought of you.
Speaker 2:So I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. I was gonna say an unexpected turn of events here in the podcast. So yeah, keep going. I'm not really used to hearing that, but so I was kind of intrigued I was going to say an unexpected turn of events here in the podcast.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, keep going. You're not really used to hearing that. So I was kind of intrigued. I was like, listen, I'm working with this startup in Halifax they're called the Rounds and I want you to come in and just meet with them so they can share with you what they're doing. And so I went and had a coffee. Two hours later they're offering me a job to come over and work for the organization.
Speaker 1:So at that time I didn't really know what the startup world was. I didn't know much about technology and most people in pharma don't know much about technology, even though the medical field is advancing all the time. But I went home, talked to my wife and thought maybe this is the time to take a chance on something, wife, and thought maybe this is the time to take a chance on something. And so I put in my resignation at Novartis and joined the company as the VP of sales and marketing. So how old was the round? At that point it was not quite three years old. So they incorporated in 2012,. But they really didn't get launched until about 2013, 2014. And so they had a viable product on the market. They actually had some membership established, but they didn't really have a revenue model established at the time.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's just a fairly dramatic shift, I think is maybe safe to say from a career standpoint. Like I think there's a lot of folks that are listening or have changed jobs, but those changes are often incremental changes. You know, you go from one role to a more senior role or you go from one pharma company to a different pharma company. But leaving a senior role in an organization you've been with for 16 years that is as reputable and as large as Novartis, where frankly you could have contemplated staying there probably for the rest of your career, to go and leave and go to a three-year-old technology startup, seems like an exponential career change. What was it about that opportunity that after the coffee you went back to your wife and said I think I'm going to do this.
Speaker 1:I always wanted to grow within Novartis. I actually thought I would be a lifer there. I wasn't really sure, but I think there was always a bit of an entrepreneurial bug. My grandfather was a successful businessman in my small hometown. My mother actually ran her own company. My brother actually moved back to Halifax close to the same time that I did. We were both living away and we moved back to Halifax and he started his own business and I always knew I wanted to go down that direction. You know all stems back from reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad when I was in high school and you know you're thinking of all these incremental steps of like getting down the down that path and that really excited me of eventually wanting to go that route.
Speaker 1:But culture shock was like it hit me in the forehead pretty shortly after. I mean, there's no resources at a startup. You have to be able to do everything, you have to know everything and you don't know anything. So you have to know everything without knowing anything and that's really challenging. So you really are starting from scratch without a lot of support and you have to start thinking about what made you successful in your career and that is tapping into the local mentors or advisors or people that can help you guide through it, because it is really scary at first and three or four months after I joined the company, we actually had to restructure half of the organization at the startup that I just joined, and so here's a really big impact on the team three or four months after joining, realizing that runway is really important. You have to think about that. I never thought about paychecks when I was working at Novartis.
Speaker 2:No, you sort of weren't thinking about Novartis' cash position. I think about you sort of saying it kind of hit you in the forehead the lack of probably like scaffolding and discipline that exists in a three-year-old startup, compared to a Novartis, where you're not going to go and pull the template or the standing operating procedures for almost anything, Almost everything. At that point you are making up from scratch and intuition and conversations. It's just such a different world.
Speaker 1:It's so different when you walk into it and see nothing there. But I think the one benefit of coming from where I came from at Novartis is that you know the training that we did receive there and they also, you know, novartis supported me to go through my MBA program when I was working in Calgary, and so that gave me a little bit of knowledge in areas that I needed to know a little bit about. You know, you don't really become an expert in anything doing your MBA, but you kind of, you know, understand the overall arching theme of what you need to do and then you know I think the other thing too is two weeks after I started I had to go and present at the board meeting, and I've never been to a board meeting, so like to go to walk in there and see that environment. I realized that I had a lot to learn in a very short period of time.
Speaker 2:So maybe give us a sense of where was the business at that point? You were saying that there wasn't maybe a really clear revenue model figured out, but there had been some traction in market. Was the value proposition of the product similar to what it is now? Just give us a sense of where things were at that point for the business and the product.
Speaker 1:We probably were at about 25% of the membership that we are today, maybe even a little bit less, but they did have a fairly decent cohort of primary care physicians and emergency physicians at the time.
Speaker 1:They had two early adopters from a pharma perspective that had kind of purchased campaigns with us, but they hadn't been implemented at the time and so we were really just at the very beginning of finding out whether or not we could actually drive revenue from this business.
Speaker 1:And then, about a year and a half after joining, the company was still kind of struggling to get its footing. So there was a pretty big restructuring at that time and we went down to three people it was just myself and two engineers left and we did consider at that time of you know, will this company make it? And the board was very interested to see if we could turn it around and I just asked them, like, let me see if I can build it, Give me a year. And we sort of just plugged away and from there we focused on downsizing what we were trying to do originally get refocused on the core areas that we thought we could do well and we just grew one employee at a time and we just sort of like chugged along and just scraped by for a couple of years and then the pandemic came, and then that kind of was a big turning point for us.
Speaker 2:So I kind of jumped right in with a whole bunch of questions because I know you and I know the rounds and at my former agency we worked with you guys. That is maybe presupposing that anyone who's listening and everyone who's listening knows all about the rounds. So maybe this is a good time partway through the conversation to say talk to me about the rounds itself. What's the value proposition? Give me a sense of how you fit into the market, like, let's talk about the business. Give me a sense of the business and what the rounds are.
Speaker 1:So the rounds is a leading technology platform that enables personalized, efficient and secure knowledge exchange and that really is dedicated towards HCPs. We have the rounds, which is primarily Canadian physicians, and we have QIDio, which is primarily pharmacists, and so both platforms operate the same way. It really is hosted kind of like on a social layer where when you come in as a physician, your experience is customized to how you entered into our platform. So the specialty that you're in the province that you came in from, your interests, events that you attend and that kind of activity. So when you come in, you actually build your own profile. So every physician that comes on the platform, they're vetted by our team that they are a verified physician in Canada, the platform. So they're in a safe environment, they can join various events that we host.
Speaker 1:And I would say the biggest value prop for our members is the ability to engage with thought leaders in different therapeutic areas so that they can understand what's going on within the market or changes in the landscape for therapeutic options.
Speaker 1:And the other option that they have too is they have access to pharmaceutical brand information on demand. So if they don't have a rep coming into their office that week and they want to get information, they can easily come to our site and then get information if that company is working with us. We're trying to expand that part of it we can talk about that a little bit later on for our pharma clients is that we're getting a, I would say, a much downsized field for us than what used to be out there, getting information in front of these physicians at a higher frequency. So it really is supporting educational sponsorships that come in so that the those that information can get into in front of the right audience, but then also their brand information can also live on our site and get in front of that audience. So we're really expanding their reach and frequency and maximizing the resources they have, because we have seen a huge decrease in the resources for field force activity. That needs to be substituted and supported in some ways so these physicians can get the information.
Speaker 2:Almost all of our listener base is on the marketing side of healthcare. There's not a lot of HTPs that are tuning in right now. Give us a sense of two or three key use cases for industry, for brands, for the rounds, where you feel there's nobody that does it better. Where's your key use cases for brands that are thinking about solving brand challenges? And the rounds might be a really important tool in their toolkit.
Speaker 1:Well, I think there's two things to it. So one we started to partner with Pab right away. So Pab has always been a partner of ours and not like a like we don't have a signed partnership, but they've always been a partner in how we not like a like we don't have a signed partnership, but they've always been a partner in how we actually built the platform. So one of the nice things is that everything that we do is compliant and meets regulatory standards for any kind of marketing activities that you do on our site. Not that every company has to go through PAB, because a lot of companies do like an internal process because they're not part of the PAB group, but they have to adhere to Health Canada rules, and so the platform is designed for that.
Speaker 1:And the nice thing, too, is that we've already recognized and Cheryl Burt just published a really great white paper that shows that you know, 74% of HCPs want to go to an independent medical site, not a company sponsored site, to get information, and they also don't want to go to see medical information on social media. The place they want to see it is where they're actually thinking about their profession, and that's in our platform. So when they come on our platform, they're coming on for a purpose and so to have access to marketing material or brand information so they know how to prescribe the drug, which is the right patient profile to prescribe the drug, how to access that drug or whether or not that drug is accessible in their province, is really important. And the other thing that's really complicated right now is all the PSP programs that are associated with these brands, and that's another way to actually get really relevant information in the hands of physicians 24-7, rather than relying on a very retracted field force 24-7 rather than relying on a very retracted field force.
Speaker 2:What were your jobs to be done in that year when you made that pitch to the board and said give us some runway? Obviously it worked, because here we're talking today and you guys are doing really, really well. What did you want to achieve in that year and how did you get there?
Speaker 1:Well, I think the big thing is that we realized that physicians aren't going to come to our site to get advertising put in front of them. So the whole core of why we wanted to build the rounds is to ensure that knowledge exchange could happen between physician and physician, so peers could actually support peers. Experts in that therapeutic area could help primary care physicians, and we were not seeing the level of engagement that we really wanted to see physicians and we were not seeing the level of engagement that we really wanted to see, and so we made a pretty big pivot that you know, 95% of our revenue when I joined was really geared towards marketing campaigns. Now we're over 70 to 75% of our revenue is driven from sponsored education, and so we realized that physicians will come in because they want to listen to that thought leader, share their experience or their knowledge about that therapeutic area, and that started to really develop very quickly for us in 2018 and into 2019.
Speaker 1:And the other thing, too, is that we stopped trying to be everything to everyone. We couldn't really manage every specialty. We were too small of a team and we realized we couldn't have all you know, 52 specialties, and then you've got hundreds of subspecialties within that to really provide enough content for. So we really pared it down to just a couple and tried to do those really well. And that started to be where we get the traction, because all of a sudden there was enough material and content and reason for physicians to come back in, and that's something that we've really evolved and focused on more and more. So we haven't really spread super wide yet into that many specialties. We have about 10 that we really focus in on and I think that's been. The difference for us is we just couldn't do everything for everyone.
Speaker 2:Honestly, between this podcast and another podcast that I host, there's almost never a conversation that I have with somebody who runs or leads a business where the pandemic doesn't come up as sort of a watershed moment either one way or the other. And the pandemic was quite an accelerant for a lot of businesses. Very complicated feelings around that because of just how terrible the pandemic was, but just from a pure business standpoint the pandemic was quite transformative and I have to imagine that as a platform that is digital, where brands and HCPs can connect with other HCPs, it must have been quite a time for you guys what happened during the pandemic for the rounds.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it happened really fast for us too. We actually had to essentially shut down all of our activity for two months because we felt it was kind of disrespectful to run, you know, a diabetes education session during, like this huge global crisis, and so we actually wiped out our revenue for two full months, which, for a startup, is very, very challenging. But we had a massive flood of companies reaching out to us saying how do we navigate the pandemic digitally with you? And so what looked like a really challenging time and we didn't know really how we were going to weather the storm. All of a sudden the inbound exploded and our membership exploded.
Speaker 1:So we had the highest number of enrollments during that time, especially on the pharmacy side. We had like 1100 pharmacists sign up within like a six week window, which we never have that kind of volume coming in at one time where we had to try to find a way to manage that verification process. And then for us, you know, field forces were at home and everyone was kind of panicking how do we stay in front of these physicians? But in a kind of a kind way during a challenging time. So, you know, our business took off. We had probably the our hot. Well, it was probably one of our biggest years in history, so it kind of sparked a renewal of energy within within the team of where we could really take this.
Speaker 2:One of the things that you've mentioned to me in previous conversations which I'm always a bit astounded at is that is that you guys manage the development of your platform in-house. Right, you have a technology team. Did the scaling up of the audience, did it kind of stress the platform, or was there a bit of relief where, hey look, this thing that we built can scale that quickly? What was the technology side of?
Speaker 1:that big push. I think the really good thing is when you do have a built-in house, you know how to navigate those things quite effectively and I would say right from the get-go, the product was built really soundly. So we had a really good foundation to work from and I would butcher if I get into like a full technical conversation, but I'm-.
Speaker 2:Oh, I wouldn't even understand. You could say a whole bunch of things and I would think that you're super smart.
Speaker 1:But a few years back we containerized the whole platform where it's kind of easy to put things in and out, but we didn't really put any stress from the volumes.
Speaker 1:We had a couple of crashes that happened when we had a little overabundance of people jumping on, but things were resolved quite quickly. Again, a benefit of having an in-house team because they can actually manage that immediately rather than calling for tech support from another managing service. And right now I'm very involved with the product team as we kind of look at some really interesting innovations that we're driving right now, which I'm super excited about, and we've got really two strong leaders on the product and engineering side that I'm really excited to see where we can really take this product. And so you know, I wanted to joke around with the team a little while ago of like it's almost like the Kellogg's Corn Flakes commercial that came out when we were kids, of like taste it again for the first time, because I think people that worked with us back in like 2019, 2020, they're not experiencing what we have the capabilities of to do now, and so it's really cool to watch what we can do and build, and we've got some really smart people on the team to make that happen.
Speaker 2:Is it too early to ask about the innovations that you're excited about? Are you able to talk about what's kind of in the product development pipeline, or is that a little too secret, right?
Speaker 1:now. No, it's not too secret. I mean, we're developing this industry hub to actually provide physicians with better access to information from the various pharma brands, which I would just encourage people to reach out to us and find out what that is. It's a really cost-effective way to get your brand in front of an intended audience, but also give them more than just a banner ad. The one thing that I think is important is that you build awareness for your brand, but if a physician needs more information, they want to get it immediately.
Speaker 1:It's like any other industry right now. If you just see a banner ad and that link doesn't really take you anywhere or that link takes you to somewhere where you have to re-register for something else, that bounce rate is super, super high, and we're trying to create a turnkey solution that will adopt really well with companies. Pharma pro portals Everyone's built one, but no physicians are going we can help solve that issue and that's one thing that we're really excited about helping our pharma clients with. And then the integration of AI into almost everything we do and machine learning and large language models is going to be that next fruition of giving our members a really cool experience when they come into the platform and making sure that they see the things that they should see, but also have a customized experience that's just going to improve that user experience every single time they come in.
Speaker 2:So the first part of that is almost a concept of the rounds as the single sign-on for HCPs.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I mean we have single sign-on capabilities that we can actually work with medical associations or pharma, but the deep link route is probably the most beneficial for pharma, where you can bypass that registration and deep link them to the exact thing that you want to take the physician to and bypass that registration. We do a really strict verification process, so the security of actually having an HCP getting to your deep link is one of the main benefits.
Speaker 2:The last few years at least, have been a bit unconventional, I think, for a lot of businesses. There's been some budget freezes, there's been some spending in different areas. There's been, I think, a do more with less kind of notion. The economy is still kind of funny Again, access to HCPs just even in the healthcare space things are different than maybe some of those pre-pandemic years when you had a pretty half-decent sense of what's going on year over year. So how has the coming out of the pandemic the last few years been for you guys? And then, where do you see, you know, where do you see things going as you look forward from today?
Speaker 1:We think about this one a lot because it's a reality for us and we definitely received, I would say, special budgets during the pandemic where, you know, people were grasping at straws a little bit and finding a digital solution. And then, I think, the year after that, then there was a lot of testing going on, seeing like which provider could actually provide the best numbers or whatever they were looking for in that space. So I think there was a lot of like testing and spreading that out to find out what's the better fit. There was a lot of like testing and spreading that out to find out what's the better fit. And then, I think, just in the last I would say 12 to 16, 12 to 18 months, you're starting to see people get really specific on understanding what is return on education, what is return on investment with these different campaigns that they're trying to run and trying to understand the data more effectively.
Speaker 1:Because when you deal with an endemic platform like ours, which is a small, closed circuit network like this, is a closed group of physicians and it's a finite number.
Speaker 1:We're not Facebook, we're not LinkedIn, we're not Twitter or X, sorry, and so you're not going to get millions of views because there's only a finite number of physicians that are really at the target audience for you.
Speaker 1:So, to understand that you know the average click-through rate somewhere is you know, usually like 0.3 or 0.03 or something. It's really low. So if you're expecting click-through rates to be the key driver of what success means to your campaign, an endemic platform probably isn't the right space for you. But, like in getting reach and frequency or ensuring that you can gain insights from the educational programs that you run, that's where you're going to get the most value for where we are and we've seen that start to come back. So I would say the conversations are getting more sophisticated with clients. They want to know more and I think they're understanding the value of being kind of in this closed-knit circle of trust rather than just in the open market, and it does give them greater capabilities of what they can do with us versus doing something on social which could get in front of consumers, which is obviously a no-no in Canada.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and so where do you see sort of zooming out a little bit? Yep, and so where do you see sort of zooming out a little bit? Where do you see? What are you seeing as the macro kind of trends in the therapeutic areas that you're working in? What are your just observations about the kind of industry as a whole.
Speaker 1:You guys have a really unique perspective. Yeah, I mean, everyone went targeted medicine for quite some time and I think targeted medicine is still there. It's there to stay and you see all these immunotherapies and the biosimilars having a lot of traction out there. But the move back to big blockbuster drugs is kind of making a shift back into the market. I was back in the days of the ACE, ARB categories and the Lipitoris and all that stuff coming out where it was mayhem because they were so big and growing so fast. We're kind of getting a sense of that right now If you look at the obesity market, the diabetes market, women's health, mental health, vaccines. So it's really coming into this population-based medicine again where all of a sudden all these companies have retracted their primary care field forces but now they have these drugs that need to be in the hands of every physician, not just, you know, 10% of the Canadian physician population. This has to be in every single physician's office so they have the right tools in their toolbox to treat their patients.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I was thinking when you mentioned Blockbuster drugs. I mean, those are the days of a whole bunch of reps knocking on a whole bunch of primary care physician doors, and that is something that has just been retracting over time, and I think there's a lot of physicians who don't necessarily want the door knock anymore, which is, I'm guessing, kind of where maybe you guys come in as well. Right, where there's a. I don't want necessarily rep-driven emails. I'm not really opting into digital. There's sort of more of these kind of no-see physicians, but yours is a platform that they can opt into on their own terms, especially as some of these brands are trying to target markets and physician categories that they've pulled back from.
Speaker 1:That's exactly it. I mean, if you talk to a lot of physicians on Monday morning, they get 80 to 100 or the industry emails coming into their inbox. So a lot of them create like a different inbox to manage that, where in our platform the physicians can come in and they can tweak their notification settings based on their preferences so they're getting the information when they want and they can also get the information that they want so they're not just getting bombarded by everything. And I think that pharma still needs to do the in-person activity. That connection with physicians especially like the KOLs and thought leaders that are really important in building that brand and understanding that molecule to get that information out, is still important.
Speaker 1:For sure, you're never going to reach the same reach and frequency that we could do back 20 years ago, and so you have to find a way that again aligns with all other industries right now. So if you want to go on vacation or if you want to buy a car, you're not waiting for a car salesman to knock on your door and then talk. You know, talk to every single car salesman. You're going somewhere to get that information, and I think you know there's lots of evidence that shows that doctors spend an hour or two hours every single day looking at therapeutic options online, but they want to find credible places to go to, and I think we're becoming one of those credible places for physicians to come one of those credible places for physicians to come.
Speaker 2:Well, I am fascinated by the journey. There's not a lot of businesses who are able to take a step back, like you did a few years before the pandemic and reevaluate, almost rebuild, relaunch and come back even stronger. That's often a sign that the window might have been closed. So it's been really interesting for me to hear about not only how you and the team have been able to kind of refocus and grow the platform, but where you think things are going. I really appreciate the conversation and all the insights today. Thanks for your time, Tim. Yeah, thank you, Neil, and before we go, I should also say thank you very much for being a great partner. You've been a partner for our events. I appreciate your time on the podcast and it's been really great working with you and Cheryl on the round, so thank you for that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It's been great to attend the events and you've done a really great job of bringing the community together, so similar to what we're doing is trying to build that community. We're along for the ride.