‘Data speaks louder than opinions’: Doceree’s Jessica Rourke Leads with Numbers

The notion of a career in healthcare presented itself early to Jessica Rourke. When she was in her final year of high school, her uncle, an anesthesiologist, offered her the chance to observe knee and heart surgeries from a vantage point just outside the operating room. The daughter of two teachers who had little interest in following in her parents’ footsteps, Rourke found herself fascinated by both the precision and the intensity of the procedure.

“It started my passion,” she recalls. “I could smell the sweat and the burning skin. I was just amazed by what the surgeons were able to do under all that pressure.”

Ultimately Rourke chose not to pursue a career as a physician or nurse. “It was great to know I wasn’t one of those people who passes out when they see blood, but I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know if I have the brains to do this,’” she cracks. 

The ER’s loss was pharma media’s gain. Now a business director at Doceree, Rourke has established herself as one of the industry’s most progressive HCP-side data and marketing execs. Unlike many people who find themselves in similar roles, however, Rourke embraced it from the outset.

“Everyone in my generation loved DTC. It was all about the commercials for them,” she says. “HCP was not what people wanted to specialize in, even five years ago when we started to do all these amazing things with the data… I hyper-focused myself on it.”

Rourke did so less because she identified a neglected niche than because she understood at...