00:00:00 – 00:00:08 Nitin Bajaj

Hey everyone, welcome to The Industry Show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj, and joining me today is Ritesh Patel. Ritesh, welcome on the show.

00:00:09 – 00:00:11 Ritesh Patel

Well, thank you for having me. Nice to see you again, Nitin.

00:00:12 – 00:00:17 Nitin Bajaj

Likewise, it’s always a pleasure. Let’s start with the big question: who is Ritesh?

00:00:17 – 00:00:43 Ritesh Patel

Oh gosh, that’s a big question, and you know, I don’t know, nobody’s ever asked me that before. So, digital guy, I have been doing digital things for many, many years. I’ve always been the adopter of new technologies very early. Been in the industry for a while. I’ve worked for many, many years. While some people were going to college and learning things in college, I was actually doing it at work. So, I had about a 10-year head start, I think, to everybody else.

00:00:44 – 00:01:08 Ritesh Patel

Raised in the UK, but I was born in Kenya. I was part of the British Empire at the time. We moved when Kenya became independent and moved to London. So, grew up in London, got educated there. Came to the US back in the ’80s to work for a startup travel company that basically, when I joined, I think I was employee number six or seven or something crazy like that. That business grew, and the founder of the firm sold it to Amex for a god of money.

00:01:09 – 00:01:24 Ritesh Patel

By the time we sold it, in five years, we had offices in 43 states. So, we grew very, very fast, which is where I got the entrepreneurial bug. Figured out, wow, this is great. You can do whatever you can in America. So, learned technology and have been enamored by it ever since.

00:01:25 – 00:01:44 Ritesh Patel

So, history from a professional perspective: travel, hotels, then banking, then commercial real estate as the IT CIO for an ad agency, then consulting, and then advertising agency, and then healthcare in 2010. So, got into healthcare in 2010.

00:01:45 – 00:02:07 Ritesh Patel

From a personal perspective, you know, I do music. It’s a passion of mine. So, I do a radio show on a Wednesday night on jazz and soul and R&B, because that’s what I grew up with in England. And I just started doing a Sunday show, one-hour show called the DJ Ritter’s Desi Hour. So, I get requests from my friends, and I play them all night. So, there you are.

00:02:09 – 00:02:29 Nitin Bajaj

And what a fascinating combination. And I’m looking forward to our audience getting to know you a little better over the next few minutes. Let’s talk about Doceree. This is something you’ve been involved with for a few years. Tell us why you started this and give us a sense of the size and scale of the operations today.

 

00:02:30 – 00:03:10 Ritesh Patel

Actually, I didn’t start it. Hershey Jane is the founder and CEO of this, headquartered in New Delhi. He was the country head of India for McCann Advertising, and he got this idea. He just happened to call me because here in the US at the time, back in 2019, I was working at Ogilvy Health, and we had a point-of-care advertising business for our clients, where we had sort of figured out between 2016 and 2019 a way to send messages to doctors in the electronic health record system while they’re sitting with patients to educate them about a potential drug or a medication or a device or whatever.

00:03:11 – 00:03:49 Ritesh Patel

So, he called and said, “Look, I’m building one of these things. It’s going to be an ad tech platform that will automate what you do manually.” And I said, “Great. If you build it, we’ll be your clients.” And so, 2020, Hershey launched the business. 2021, he came, I think, to the US, and we, as Ogilvy, became a client, and it’s been ever since following the trail. And late last year, February last year, he sort of suggested, “Maybe I should join the company. I’ve been a big fan and always promoting it and letting people know about it and everything else.” So, joined in 2024, in February. It’ll be one year coming up.

00:03:49 – 00:04:27 Ritesh Patel

The company is really poised because the moment is right. During COVID, no sales reps could get into the buildings to teach doctors about products. Doceree came along at the right time to be able to message doctors in the EHR. Since then, you know, grown, a couple of hundred people in India, about a hundred people here, 10 people, I think, in London for Europe. All the top pharma companies, eight of the top 10 pharma companies use the platform. And we grew into doing now display advertising, programmatic in medical journals, and also account-based targeting. And we’ve just launched our first agentic AI virtual sales rep for pharma.

00:04:28 – 00:04:32 Nitin Bajaj

Nice. That’s literally defining the cutting edge.

00:04:32 – 00:04:32 Ritesh Patel

Correct.

00:04:34 – 00:05:00 Nitin Bajaj

That’s amazing. Now, the lens I like to put on all these things is the impact someone’s work is creating for the community. You touched upon it. Nobody was able to get into the doors, and Doceree provided that way. Give us a sense of what that meant for your stakeholders, for your customers, and their businesses and work.

 

00:05:01 – 00:05:22 Ritesh Patel

It’s threefold, right? One is doctors always need to know what the latest thing is, and they don’t have time to educate themselves. Particularly after COVID, you know, we have a severe shortage of doctors in this country. They don’t go to the medical meetings like they used to to learn about new products that are coming online for a certain, particularly in things like cancer care, for example.

00:05:22 – 00:05:35 Ritesh Patel

And the third thing is that there’s more competition. More and more products are coming onto the marketplace by pharma companies for specific things. You know, 30 years ago, there was maybe one treatment for breast cancer. Now I think there’s about 10, right?

00:05:36 – 00:05:41 Ritesh Patel

So how do you, as a doctor, know which one’s right for your patient? How do you make that decision? You need to get educated.

00:05:42 – 00:05:55 Ritesh Patel

For the pharma companies, it was a way of, you know, I don’t have a physical human who’s able to call on this person, but I can still engage this person and educate them about my product, the safety profile, the efficacy, whatever it is.

00:05:55 – 00:06:11 Ritesh Patel

And for the patients, it means they get the latest treatments, that their doctor is aware of the latest treatments, and then they can prescribe them, use them, whatever the case may be. And that’s the beauty of what Docare has to offer from education and also from the stakeholders that are in the care team.

00:06:13 – 00:06:32 Nitin Bajaj

Love that. Now, as you go through one of the most regulated industries and work across a spectrum of providers, some of the largest, I’m sure you deal with a lot of challenges. If you had to call out the biggest one, what would that be?

00:06:33 – 00:07:03 Ritesh Patel

I’d say the biggest challenge we have right now is educating the hospitals and the health systems about the benefits of this so we can integrate better with their workflows. It’s not, it’s seen as advertising and promotion, but it’s more education and engagement. And the physicians don’t have the time to educate themselves. So why not give them relevant educational material at the point that they’re treating a patient?

00:07:04 – 00:07:06 Nitin Bajaj

True. I mean, they’re already looking for information.

00:07:07 – 00:07:07 Ritesh Patel

Exactly.

00:07:07 – 00:07:12 Nitin Bajaj

And it’s at the point, in the moment. Makes sense.

00:07:12 – 00:07:27 Ritesh Patel

Yeah, yeah. But it is difficult to convince a hospital to allow us to do this. We still have a lot of hospitals that we talk to a lot and, you know, show them and explain and the benefits, and it takes a while.

00:07:28 – 00:07:29 Nitin Bajaj

It’s a long-tail process.

00:07:30 – 00:07:31 Ritesh Patel

Yeah, very much so.

00:07:31 – 00:07:40 Nitin Bajaj

Now, as you look at these challenges, on the flip side are opportunities. What’s the one that you’re most excited about?

00:07:40 – 00:08:04 Ritesh Patel

I would say right now, the what we call Rep Twin, which is an agentic AI rep. Here’s why. Pharma companies in general have 20% of their customers that they know about. They know them very well. They’re target accounts, as they’re called, or key accounts, right? Every business has this set of key accounts, but that’s 20, maybe, percent of your business. It’s that old, only 80-20 rule.

00:08:04 – 00:08:33 Ritesh Patel

Then they have another 20% that they believe could be customers that they’ve identified around various means. You still have another 60% that nobody’s talking to. But if you had an agentic AI rep that could reach out to those people, either in a banner ad, so I am a doctor, I’m researching some breast cancer thing, and a little banner ad pops up and a rep comes up and says, “Hey, I’m from BMS. I’d like to tell you all about our newest indication.” Brilliant, right?

00:08:33 – 00:08:50 Ritesh Patel

It’s trained, it knows everything about the product, the brand, everything else. So you can scale it very, very quickly. So this agentic AI capability will change the way we can do lead generation and customer engagement and handholding and a whole bunch of things that you needed humans for.

00:08:51 – 00:09:14 Nitin Bajaj

That’s super exciting now. You know, obviously, as you mentioned, some companies, some businesses, some institutions are slower than others to adopt new technology. Pharma companies, I’m thinking not as much. But have you started positioning this and getting some initial feedback on what the responses are?

00:09:14 – 00:09:25 Ritesh Patel

Yes. We have some friendly folks that we’ve been piloting this with. The feedback has been enormously good.

00:09:25 – 00:09:39 Ritesh Patel

There are a couple of things that we have to worry about. How do we train this rep? What are they trained on? And from a legal and a regulatory perspective, how are we managing that risk, right? What is the thing that we need to do?

00:09:39 – 00:09:53 Ritesh Patel

So those are some of the things that we’re working on with these partners, with the pilots that we have going. But, you know, we’ve got a lot of it already set because we’ve got five years’ worth of history and data about engagement with doctors on our platform already.

00:09:53 – 00:10:08 Ritesh Patel

You know, we’ve got six million doctors on our platform. We have their entire digital graph. We know who they are, what practice they’re in, what their behavior is, what they prescribe, what they refer. So there’s a lot of data that we have already on the customer that we can use.

00:10:09 – 00:10:20 Nitin Bajaj

Right now, it’s almost like beta testing with the friendlies and just fine-tuning for those caveats and making sure there is no exposure, liabilities, etc.

00:10:20 – 00:10:39 Ritesh Patel

Exactly. I mean, the biggest fear is twofold with pharma. One is that the agent says something they shouldn’t from an indication perspective, right, which is called off-label. Let’s make sure they stay on-label. So if somebody asks, “Can I use this for this?” and the answer is no, just say no and refer to the prescribing information.

00:10:39 – 00:10:53 Ritesh Patel

And then the other one is, how do I keep track of what it’s saying? All the interactions. So we’ve built a whole mechanism in place where anytime somebody from medical or legal wants to review the conversations, they can have it all.

00:10:54 – 00:11:24 Nitin Bajaj

That’s amazing. I’m super excited. Now, as we look into the future, I want to pause and reflect and invite you to share two moments from your experience, professional or personal, and share one instance where things did not work out as you had expected. There was disappointment, failure, lessons. And another instance where things exceeded your expectations and became a success beyond your imagination.

00:11:25 – 00:12:26 Ritesh Patel

Gosh. Failure would be in the early dot-com days. We were roaring. Everybody was. And we had a client who had made a bunch of promises around how we could digitize and transform their catalog business. And we took on, I don’t know, 300,000 SKUs. It was a bigger job than we had ever imagined. And it didn’t go well. The user interface went very well. It looked really nice, but it was just an awful experience. And the client ended up firing us. And lesson learned there, you know, really is around requirements and making sure you know exactly what you’re trying to do before you pitch it and promise it, right? So that was a big failure. And it was a big, big hit for us. You know, there was about 15 people on that account at the time trying to build this thing. So there was a lot of lost revenue there, which hurt a little bit. But it was the dot-com boom. So we made it up.

00:12:26 – 00:14:05 Ritesh Patel

I think the success, I would say, was during my time at Cushman Wakefield, where we were challenged to roll out a global CRM. And it was really amazingly complex because here in the US, the commercial real estate agents are 1099 employees. So they have their own business. And they compete against each other. So you’ll have five brokers sitting in a Cushman and Wakefield office competing for the same thing, right? Whereby outside of the US, they’re employees of Cushman and Wakefield. So we had to build what I called a schizophrenic CRM, where outside of the US, everybody could see everything about a customer in one file, which is what a CRM is supposed to be. But here in the US, you can only see it when the broker shared it with you. So we had to figure out a mechanism where it’s in, “Can I share this with you? I’d love to do a deal with you. You know what? I’ll share my commission with you if we go after this client together.” And then you go, “Okay, then I’ll turn this feature on and now we can collaborate,” right? And it had to be rolled out. And I thought, “This is never going to work,” right? Absolutely no way. And it was boom. As soon as we started rolling it out, the brokers started to see that they could do two or three more deals now. All of a sudden, they were more efficient. They were getting more data. And the big thing we did was we connected to their Outlook. So it was part of their normal workflow in email, right? It wasn’t something where you have to go somewhere separately. And it was success beyond my imagination. And the project came in on time and under budget.

00:14:06 – 00:14:06 Nitin Bajaj

No way.

00:14:06 – 00:14:10 Ritesh Patel

Yeah. $14 million. IT project.

00:14:10 – 00:14:10 Nitin Bajaj

Wow.

00:14:11 – 00:14:17 Ritesh Patel

On time and under budget. I had a great project manager, Rob Ocendo to this day. Probably the best PM we ever had.

00:14:19 – 00:14:20 Nitin Bajaj

Never heard that before.

00:14:20 – 00:14:22 Ritesh Patel

Yeah. Great success.

00:14:23 – 00:14:27 Nitin Bajaj

Congratulations to you and the team. That’s massive.

 

00:14:27 – 00:14:27 Ritesh Patel

Yeah.

00:14:29 – 00:14:43 Nitin Bajaj

Now, we talked about work and, you know, some fascinating things you brought to life. What do you do to kick back, de-stress? I mean, music for sure, but are there other things you use as an escape?

00:14:45 – 00:15:00 Ritesh Patel

You know, civil service primarily, I would say, more than anything else. I’m a very active board member of AAPI New Jersey. I think that we in the Asian community need to have our voices heard. It’s a passion of mine. And we do a lot of engagement.

00:15:00 – 00:15:22 Ritesh Patel

It started out as AAPI Montclair during COVID. And our view was the founder, Amber and Julie, they’re both of Korean descent. So how do we educate people about our culture? Because if we educate people about our culture and they understand who we are, then hate sort of subsides, right? Because I now know you. So that’s how it started.

00:15:22 – 00:15:41 Ritesh Patel

We do Diwali Fest. We do Holi. There’s a Love Your Lunch program where we take our food into schools so the kids don’t go, “Ew, what’s that smell?” And they taste the samosa and a chicken tikka masala and a pad thai and all those things. So, you know, civic duty there.

00:15:41 – 00:15:55 Ritesh Patel

I’m also on the board and one of the founders of Radio Free Montclair, giving local content creators an ability to do their broadcasting themselves on a platform. So we’ve built a platform. And going for long walks, mainly trying to lose weight.

00:15:56 – 00:16:04 Ritesh Patel

But I do listen to podcasts quite a lot too, quite a few podcasts as well. But music is my number one. Music is number one. Absolutely number one.

00:16:05 – 00:16:25 Nitin Bajaj

Yeah. And I can highly recommend, or more highly recommend, both of your shows, especially the one on Sunday that’s close to me. I grew up listening to a lot of Bollywood music. And you do a phenomenal job of bringing all of that together. So.

00:16:25 – 00:16:34 Ritesh Patel

I have a theory at that. Music will always bring people together. But the bigger thing is it brings back so many good memories.

00:16:34 – 00:16:35 Nitin Bajaj

True.

00:16:35 – 00:16:57 Ritesh Patel

All right. I have a young lady who listens in Minnesota with her father that she’s looking after. She quit a very high-profile, high-powered job at Medtronic to retire and look after her dad. And she said, “Your show brings back so many memories for him.” So now I’m going all the way back to 1955 for music for Bollywood.

00:16:58 – 00:16:58 Nitin Bajaj

Nice.

00:17:00 – 00:17:02 Ritesh Patel

Tough curating it all, but it’s all good.

00:17:02 – 00:17:12 Nitin Bajaj

That is amazing. You mentioned podcasts. Would love for you to share a podcast and a book that’s a favorite.

00:17:13 – 00:18:04 Ritesh Patel

So I’m a big science fiction fanatic. So the Douglas Adams books are probably my favorite, favorites. I’ll revisit them over and over again because his style of writing was really, really good. But Arthur C. Clarke’s books were just incredible as well. And the one I really, really love is Orson Scott Card. One of his books that I highly recommend is the, what was it, The Life of Christopher Columbus, I think it’s called. I’ve forgotten. But it’s all around. Thesis, what if when Columbus landed, he was sent packing back to Spain and they never actually took ground in America? What would the Americas look like without Columbus in charge? You know, fascinating thesis. So The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is the book. I would highly recommend.

00:18:04 – 00:18:48 Ritesh Patel

On the podcast side, I’m a history buff. I’m a huge history buff. And there’s a podcast in the UK on BBC called You Are Dead to Me. And it’s a fantastic premise because what they do is they get the world’s biggest expert on a topic and they marry them with a comedian who knows nothing about the topic. So the last one I just listened to was The Mughal Empire, The History of the Mughal Empire. It’s a 30-minute podcast where they start from, you know, how did this happen? Who was in charge? Who created it? And then the comedian is asked questions about it and they’re like, “I have no idea. I thought that was some, you know, whatever.” So, but it’s a great way to learn history because it makes it so fascinating, but also very funny.

00:18:49 – 00:18:55 Nitin Bajaj

Love that. I might listen to that one with my daughters because they like history and I’m like, “Why am I interested in dead people?”

00:18:57 – 00:19:01 Ritesh Patel

Yeah, You Are Dead to Me, it’s called. It’s fantastic. It’s absolutely fantastic.00:19:01 – 00:19:12 Nitin Bajaj

Looking forward to it. Thanks for sharing those. Now on to my favorite part of the show. We call this the one-line life lessons. Ritesh, I would love for you to share your life lessons with us.

00:19:14 – 00:19:42 Ritesh Patel

Gosh. You know, from a professional perspective, I would say you’ve got to have passion and have a lot of fun doing what you’re doing. It’s not about the money or the startup or whatever. In my entire career, I’ve never, ever sort of thought about the, what am I going to get paid for this first? Is what will I enjoy doing this? And will it make a difference? And if it does, the money arrives. It always has. Yeah, that’s one.

00:19:42 – 00:20:18 Ritesh Patel

On the second professional thing, I absolutely believe in mentors. Every job I’ve had, it’s not what I was looking for. I was already somewhere and somebody called and said, “I knew you, I worked with you, or I interacted with you, and I need you to come here and do this for me.” And if you look at my LinkedIn profile, all of those roles were people calling me saying, “I need you to come do this here.” So I think having great mentors is fantastic because those mentors remember you. And if you do well, they will remember to call you when they need help. You know, those are the two professional ones.

00:20:19 – 00:20:39 Ritesh Patel

On the personal side, just life’s too short. Enjoy it. Enjoy moments. I do the radio show. I do the civic stuff because I enjoy it. You know, it’s good passion. It keeps you busy, but it keeps your mind going. And the last one I always have is, if it moves, digitize it. That’s my motto.

00:20:41 – 00:21:12 Nitin Bajaj

Love that, especially the last one. Ritesh, thank you so much for making the time to share your journey, your story, your life lessons. But most importantly, for being you and doing the things you do to help us as a community, to help us as individuals move the needle forward. Congratulations on the many successes you’ve had. And I know in many ways you’re just getting started. So really rooting for you.

00:21:13 – 00:21:13 Ritesh Patel

Thank you.

00:21:13 – 00:21:14 Nitin Bajaj

And thank you again.

00:21:15 – 00:21:18 Ritesh Patel

Oh, no, thanks for including me. This is great. I appreciate it.