epocrates’ Megan Hernandez Sticks the Landing

From grade school through college, Megan Hernandez was all about competitive cheer. She practiced nearly every night from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. up until the end of high school, which forced her to forgo any number of other pursuits and friend get-togethers. Many of her weekends were spent on the road, traveling to competitions at the Rose Bowl and other storied venues.

So the question shouldn’t be whether the experience shaped Hernandez, but in which ways and how profoundly. Clearly she has given this plenty of thought: “It teaches you time management, because those three hours every day were just blocked off to everything else,” she says in response. “It teaches you how to deal with pressure, because you’re performing in front of lots of people and being judged. It teaches you commitment, because this isn’t something you can do halfway.”

Hernandez pauses for a second, then adds, “I truly, truly loved every minute of it.”

The lessons imparted by competitive cheer have served Hernandez well. Currently director of strategic partnerships and business development at epocrates, a role in which she forges and nurtures agency relationships, Hernandez is the rare young pharma media exec hailed as much as for what she does as for the way she does it.

“When you get to know the type of person she is, her background in cheer makes so much sense,” says Joe Anzuena, director, commercial growth and strategy at epocrates. “Think of it this way: If your child is one of the people who’s going to fly, you hope that Megan is one of the people who’s going to catch. She’s always in the moment. She puts in the work.”

Mind over matter

Hernandez grew up outside Boston and became the first member of her immediate family to leave the region, moving to the New York area and later to one of its across-the-river suburbs. “They still think of New Jersey as this faraway land,” she says with a laugh.

Beyond the cheer practices and competitions, Hernandez developed an early interest in interpersonal dynamics. “I’ve always been drawn to different personalities and trying to understand how other people’s minds worked,” she says. Her original plan was to pursue a career as a therapist, but she shifted gears during college when she “realized there was a lot more to it than just talking to people… Same thing goes for being a talk-show host.”

At Marist University, Hernandez charted a dual path, double-majoring in communications/advertising and psychology. She wasted no time putting both components of her degree to work, joining NAS Recruitment Communications as a media planner. There, she bought and placed recruitment ads for a host of consumer-facing clients, including Verizon Wireless and Fidelity Investments. 

Hernandez took to both the work and the agency environment immediately. “I always say that you can’t understand what it’s like to work at an agency until you actually work at an agency,” she says. “As chaotic and crazy as it is, you’re surrounded by so many smart people and so much energy.”

After nearly two years at NAS, Hernandez joined another agency, The Gate NY, as a senior media planner working primarily on business-to-business accounts. Her first stint at athenahealth, as a senior marketing associate responsible for managing a large offline media budget, introduced her to the world of healthcare IT at a moment when the sector was experiencing exponential growth.

Toward the beginning of Hernandez’s fifth year with athenahealth, the company snapped up beloved HCP app epocrates. The move got her attention – and captured her imagination. “It expanded the possibilities for us,” she recalls.

Life interfered, however, when Hernandez’s husband was transferred to a job in New York City. The couple relocated and Hernandez returned to the agency world, as a manager, media strategy, at Starcom. She enjoyed working in the CPG space (on some of Procter & Gamble’s hair and makeup brands) but stayed in close touch with her former athenahealth colleagues. About a year later epocrates offered her a role developing agency partnerships, and Hernandez jumped at it.

“I always knew I’d go back. I didn’t know how or when, but it always felt like home,” she says.

Flattening the learning curve

The role at epocrates came with a pronounced challenge: her lack of direct pharma experience. Unlike many transplants from the realms of CPG and B2B, though, Hernandez knew what she didn’t know. She quickly set about immersing herself in all things pharma, starting with the acronyms. The cheat sheet she compiled proved invaluable, to the extent that Hernandez still shares a copy of it with new hires.

“Epocrates has been around for more than 25 years. When I joined, everyone there had been in pharma for years,” she says. “I was clearly the new kid, the outsider… I couldn’t ask enough questions.”

Hernandez’s education didn’t stop there. She sat in on calls that were outside her immediate areas of responsibility (“data, strategy, pretty much any call where I didn’t have a conflict with something else”) both to increase her knowledge base and to forge relationships with peers on other teams.

“When I’m doing something, I’m giving it 110%,” she says. “It was important to understand what every team did. The only way to learn was to jump in with two feet.”

More than 11 years and three promotions later, Hernandez has more than proven herself to her teammates across epocrates and athenahealth as well as to the agency-side leaders with whom she was tasked with bonding. She believes those partnerships are crucial to the organization’s success and, more essentially, to the success of pharma clients.

“It wasn’t always the case that those relationships [with agencies] were viewed favorably,” she explains. “Going back 15 years, other companies used to side-step the agencies, because they didn’t see the value they added.”

Hernandez disagreed then and she disagrees now. “Business moves at the speed of relationships,” she continues. “If you couldn’t see why those relationships were important, you weren’t looking at them the right  way.”

‘It’s not performative’

Anzuena believes Hernandez’s ability to meaningfully connect with pretty much anyone she encounters is something that simply can’t be taught. By way of example, he points to his own arrival at epocrates at the end of 2021.

“We do a very comprehensive onboarding process and a lot of it was virtual, so it felt a little bit like an onslaught. It was hard to take it all in,” he recalls. “I remembered Megan’s session because she didn’t present at me. It wasn’t a presentation; it was a conversation.”

And, he adds, “She was the only person who reached out after the fact – ‘Hey, have any questions?’ She invests the time to get to know people. It’s not performative.”

Hernandez hopes to spend the rest of her professional life in roles like her current one, which places her at the nexus of partnership and leadership. She reports that she has a fine set of role models at athenahealth and epocrates: “Our leaders embrace change, which is not something you see everywhere in this industry.”

When she’s off the clock, Hernandez volunteers at Badass Animal Rescue – from which she rescued her 14-year-old pit bull Anderson Cooper – and pushes back against breed-specific legislation. The rest of her time is devoted to parenting, including service as a class mom and on the local PTO. 

Meanwhile, as fate would have it, Hernandez’s two young daughters have recently dipped their toes into the world of competitive cheer. Recently she spent eight hours at a high-school gym watching her kids compete in an event. “I was there with my mom and I was like, ‘I’m so sorry I did this to you!,’ she says with a laugh. “But if it gives them what it gave me, I’ll sign up for that.”

This profile is part of the solli Elevate series, celebrating the Next Generation of Pharma Media Leaders. View all profiles here.