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.
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.
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