The power of purpose

Iona Everson from PMGroup speaks to Amar Urhekar, CEO of Avalere Health, about his professional journey within healthcare marketing and his commitment to building unconventional solutions that reach patients where they are

‘The key to addressing challenges, regardless of what they are, is an overarching philosophy based on radical human empathy’

Iona Everson (IE): What was your professional journey to your current role as CEO of Avalere Health?
Amar Urhekar (AU): It’s been a long and exciting journey, to say the least! I am a pharmacist by education, but never practised at the community level. I completed my MBA in marketing and advertising, and then I started working in advertising in India in the late 90s. In the early 2000s, McCann Erickson, one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies, wanted to set up a healthcare operation in India. With my pharmacy and management background, I was given an opportunity that basically changed the entire trajectory of my life, and I was privileged to be one of the founding members of McCann Health in India, with offices set up in Mumbai and Delhi.

McCann then asked me to move to China to rebuild business operations there after the impact of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). So in 2004, my newlywed wife and I relocated to Shanghai, which was an incredibly enriching experience on both a personal and professional level. My colleagues and I were able to successfully rebuild McCann Health into a 250-person organisation during the four and a half to five years that I lived there. Then, in the pursuit of moving further east, I had an opportunity to move to Japan as the head of McCann Health Japan, where we grew the business from 40 people to a thriving organisation of more than 300. Then I was in Singapore for a few years running the McCann Health Asia Pacific operations.

At that point, I was invited to move to New York to take on the newly created role of president of McCann Health’s North and Latin America operations. I ran the business for almost five and a half years, during which time we doubled through organic growth and brought the teams together under one McCann Health umbrella. It was a challenging experience, but it was very fulfilling.

In 2019, I pivoted to a dedicated healthcare organisation, moving to Ashfield Health, which was part of UDG Healthcare, as global president. That was memorable because, within a very short space of time, the world was brought to a halt by COVID-19. This sparked a global change in the business dynamic, which in some ways was really exciting because it offered an opportunity to reset what a dedicated healthcare marketing communications group like ours could be.

‘Through my work and life experiences, the one thing that I am sure of is the importance of being honest and transparent at all times’

At the time, Ashfield had brought in close to ten acquisitions over the previous ten years, which were still working as independent organisations, so we brought them all together under one Ashfield Health umbrella. We then merged with Huntsworth to create Inizio. I stayed on to bring the organisations together and worked as group president for a number of months.

During that time I relocated from New Jersey to North Carolina, which is when I first started interacting with Avalere Health, then called Fishawack Health.

I was excited to join Avalere Health as COO and a member of the board, and I held that role for over a year. Then, as a part of a planned succession, I was invited to take on the role of CEO, while remaining as a member of the board, working with a dynamic and talented handpicked global leadership team.

I joined Avalere Health at an important time in the company’s history. We were on the cusp of unifying every part of the business under one brand.

In a market saturated with sub-brands and spinoffs, we have created one Avalere Health. I’m incredibly proud of that. Today, we are one organisation with three core capabilities – Advisory, Medical and Marketing – unified under a single vision and service offering. Through this simplified approach, we can be a better partner for healthcare clients, providing seamless end-to-end solutions from early asset development to launch and beyond.

It’s an offering our clients, from large pharmaceutical organisations to innovative biotechs, have really responded to.

From Market Access Marketing offering to Promotional Medical Education, we are fostering unexpected connections that improve health outcomes and ensure every patient is reached.

It has been quite a journey over the last 20 to 25 years, living and working in different countries, experiencing new cultures and mastering the changing regulations of each new place. During that time, I experienced an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear plant disaster in Japan in 2011, not to mention the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This has shaped me into who I am today, as a leader, husband, father, son and friend – I am the sum of all my experiences.

I was recently telling the leadership team why I am excited to be part of this industry and I compared it to riding a tiger. It’s not just the adrenaline that keeps you clinging to the tiger’s back, it’s also the fear of being eaten! I love that adrenaline because it drives me to be the best I can be for the patients we serve. I wake up every single day thinking about what the team and I can do better to improve our work for patients. Why would I want to do anything else in life, when I have a career that continues to provide a meaningful impact and a forum where I can give back?

IE: How have these experiences shaped your approach to management?
AU: Through my work and life experiences, the one thing that I am sure of is the importance of being honest and transparent at all times. There is no point in not being open and clear, regardless of whether we are in the middle of a triple natural disaster, a global pandemic or a normal working day. I think that it is this level of human empathy that truly helps me to connect with people, irrespective of geography, culture and language. People quickly come to recognise if your empathy is real. That’s not something you can hide. I could tell you more about the many different experiences I’ve had in life, but the one thing I really believe in is our actions – starting each day with a focus on being true to our purpose and doing everything we can to help improve patients’ lives. And in order to do that, we have to have real human empathy.

IE: What have been some of the biggest challenges you have encountered and how have you addressed them?
AU: The global pandemic was a massive challenge for everybody because of the intensity and uncertainty it brought. It had an added impact for me as I’d only taken on the role of global president at Ashfield Health three months previously. Prior to that, I’d been at McCann for 15 to 20 years and I knew how the organisation worked. Ashfield Health was a new environment, with a new leadership team and set of people. Under normal circumstances, I would have had a good amount of time to build a strong level of trust and camaraderie with the people I was working with, but in this instance, I’d had less than three months. To address this, we put in place a significant set of routines to ensure we communicated consistently and built connectivity. I would send out weekly video messages and monthly newsletters detailing where we were and what our plan was. The more empathetic and communicative we were towards our stakeholders, the easier it was to help them through a very difficult journey.

Until I moved to New York, I felt that living and working in Asia Pacific and reaching the level of regional head was a massive achievement, but moving to the US in my early to mid 40s was a very difficult transition on a professional level. In Asia Pacific, when you are moving from one country to the other, you have a community of your professional and personal connections. The US is a massive melting pot of incredible talent and opportunity, and the scale at which things happen is quite daunting at first. Building the trust of the people I was working with, and those with more industry experience than me, was quite a challenge.

What helped me was, for lack of a better word, the hunger that exists in the rest of the world – for example in Asia Pacific, where there was a strong focus on getting more done with fewer resources. Bringing that emerging economy mindset helped us grow the business more quickly because we were challenging the status quo and our ways of working.

For me, the key to addressing challenges, regardless of what they are, is the overarching philosophy based on human empathy, in terms of who you are, what you do and the reasons for your actions. I am also a big believer in servant leadership.

‘I wake up every single day thinking about what the team and I can do better to improve our work for patients’

A lot of books and articles have been written about this, but the question is how you bring your version of servant leadership to life. For me, this is centred on that human empathy that comes to the fore in our work with clients and patients. In those tough business circumstances, each time I have positioned myself as a servant leader, it is the support of the team and the resources that were available that have helped me conquer the challenges.

IE: What are some of your biggest career highlights?
AU: Throughout my time at McCann, Ashfield Health and now Avalere Health, I’ve had the pleasure of building meaningful client relationships where we brought teams together to produce great work that really improved patient outcomes. I did get a strong sense of fulfilment from the way we navigated the Ashfield Health operations through the pandemic.  In the McCann world, scaling the business to double its size within the short space of five years without any acquisitions, purely on organic growth, and bringing the different McCann Health operations under one brand, entity and ethos gave me a tremendous amount of fulfilment.

When I look back, the time I spent in Japan stands out and I ended up making friends there for life. We all went through that triple natural disaster at the same time, and the people I worked with stepped up to help protect me, my wife and our very young son. The kindness and care that we received, and the professional actions that we took in terms of business continuity planning and helping people have more fulfilling, enriching careers was definitely a highlight.

That was also the year I was named agency head of the year in Asia Pacific, and McCann Health Japan received the agency of the year award, which felt quite validating.

IE: What is your vision for Avalere Health over the next five years?
AU: That’s a great question. I believe the miraculous happens when we decide we can reach every person. On 5 February, we’re launching an exciting new mission and movement to cement our commitment to improving the health of every patient.

Avalere Health has been on a journey for many years. We started off in the medical communications space and have since acquired some incredible companies, along with some great talent. We rebranded and restructured in the last year and have organised ourselves across three fundamental services: Advisory; Medical and Marketing. Through this simplified structure and unified approach, we can partner more quickly with our clients to create more agile and seamless solutions to their challenges. Today, our teams can easily join forces to develop a holistic view of the landscape, uncovering the truth about the healthcare experience for stakeholders across the product life cycle. Through these unique insights, we break down barriers that hold back progress to develop powerful strategies and solutions that truly transform people’s health. Moving forward, we see a big opportunity to bring an integrated, seamless offering across these services to help solve our clients’ complex problems. We are at that scale and inflection point as an organisation where we can really provide those solutions. We are neither very large nor very small, and we are neither a conglomerate nor a start-up. We are in that sweet spot where we can be very agile, nimble and, most importantly, deliver what we say we can. We are one Avalere Health. We are a single brand and operating unit that can bring the best talent at the right time, scale and speed to meet our clients’ needs – and we are just getting started!

We plan to bring this to life through a relentless focus on people, product and purpose. Encouraging and supporting the talented people we work with to continue to achieve their true potential. Our product focus sits at the intersection of ideas, enabled by technology, or through bringing in new, unconventional, creative thinking. Most importantly, we will focus on the purpose behind it all, which is to ensure that no patient is left behind.

Iona Everson is Group Managing Editor and Emily Kimber is Deputy Editor, both at PMGroup