One-on-One with Medicx GM Dr. Eric Trepanier

Q: You’ve had a wide variety of roles in your career – pharmacist, Wall Street analyst, head of marketing sciences and insights, to name a few. What drew you to this role with Medicx?

Dr. Eric Trepanier: I have always had a passion for healthcare. It’s been the focus of my education and my career. Healthcare is important to me because ultimately, it’s about helping patients and physicians make good decisions and, in the end, make the country healthier.

I was drawn to Medicx because I believe our value proposition is extremely compelling in terms of adding value for pharma brand managers and their agencies. We can target patients in a privacy-compliant way in a manner that no one else can do in the market. We find the patients our clients are looking for to deliver strong audience quality, which allows brands to deliver their message to the right patients.

Q: Now that you have some time in the job under your belt, what are a couple of the things you find most exciting about Medicx?

ET: I’m most excited about the way we have evolved our corporate culture using the simple but powerful framework from the book The Ideal Team Player. Its story resonates with many people. You see, there are three indispensable virtues—humble, hungry, and people smart—that make people ideal team players. Using this framework in everything from our hiring process and performance reviews to the way we interact with each other has been transformational for the company. It has helped the team gel and ramped up our level of performance. It has also inspired much more open, transparent communication and collaboration at Medicx.

Q: What is your professional motto?

ET: It’s simple. Create the right culture, as we discussed earlier. Hire and empower the right people, which we’ve become very successful at doing. And the results will follow.

Q: Which industry trends are you most excited about right now?

ET: There are two trends I think are important for us right now. The first is efficiency. Every company, and in many cases, every employee is being asked to do more with less. The great thing is that our Micro-Neighborhood^® targeting platform empowers our pharma and other healthcare clients to do just that. Because we zero in on the hyper-local areas where we know patients with a particular condition live, we help clients maximize the efficiency of their media spends, and accomplish more with any budget they have.

The second trend that’s on my mind is the continued focus on data-driven approaches to marketing. As I mentioned before, our patented platform provides exceptionally granular targeting, in a privacy-safe and HIPAA-compliant manner. During campaign execution, we leverage our Medicx Machine Learning Engine to optimize to brand KPIs. We also optimize to audience quality to ensure the brand message gets in front of the right patients. The way we leverage data in every step of the campaign is our unique value proposition.

Q: What are you most looking forward to professionally in 2020?

ET: 2019 has been a time of growth and evolution for Medicx. I’m looking forward to seeing what our new, seasoned team accomplishes in the new year. We’ve recruited some great talent and grown our skillset in some crucial areas, including analytics, agency healthcare knowledge, and overall pharma and healthcare strategy experience. If you can believe it, our leadership team has well over 100 years of collective industry experience. What this all means is that we are more equipped than ever to support our clients’ business goals and drive their brand sales.

Q: As an avid traveler, I know you enjoy far-flung destinations. Which one impressed you most recently, and why?

ET: My wife and I fell in love with Madagascar on our first trip there. It is a unique country that most people have never heard of, except for the cartoon movie of that name. Some call it the Galapagos Islands of Africa because it is home to wildlife and plants that don’t exist outside the island country. The most famous examples are the lemur, a unique primate, and the fossa, a cat-like predator on the island. This unique wildlife is what drove us to visit. We love traveling to exotic destinations with interesting nature and wildlife.

Q: Last winter, you tried your hand at event planning by producing your first fundraising event that benefitted lemurs in Madagascar. Tell me a little about the charity and what you learned from working on the project.

ET: As I said before, we fell in love with the country and its wildlife. During our time on the island, we quickly learned that massive deforestation is eliminating the habitat where lemurs and other animals live. The unfortunate result of the deforestation is that most lemur species are now endangered.

Before our trip, we met a professor and world-renowned primatologist from Stony Brook University. After spending three days at her research facility on the island and learning more about her amazing conservation work, I decided to lead a team that put together a fundraiser to help fund her work. I had never produced an event before, so the work was all new for me. I learned that a focused team of people who are passionate about a cause could achieve significant results. In four short months, we organized a 100-person dinner with live and silent auctions, and a live lemur at the party. Ultimately and importantly, we also exceeded our fundraising goal. With the right team, you can accomplish anything. This is what we’re doing at Medicx too!

Medicx Media Solutions provides best-in-class analytics-driven healthcare marketing solutions that set the standard for hyper-locally targeted multi-channel marketing and media campaigns with a focus on life sciences and other health-related brands. Learn more at medicxhealth.com.