‘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 an early age that, in her words, “Data speaks louder than opinions.” Her path began while studying marketing at Ithaca College, when she went to work at nearby King Ferry Winery (now known as Treleaven Wines). There, she served as both a tasting room and marketing assistant, handling everything from PR to designing shelf labels to manning the booth at farmer’s markets.

“The universe has a way of pushing you in a direction that you might not think is right for you, but very much is,” Rourke says. She remains a wine enthusiast, receiving her Level 2 certification from the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) in 2023. 

‘I got my hands dirty’

After graduation, Rourke joined WPP’s CommonHealth Adient as a traffic coordinator (“a role I’m not sure exists anymore,” she says). She was happy to learn from anyone who would give her an audience, but characterizes her work during that period as “mostly carrying around a folder, routing ads through legal and creative.” While the job didn’t expose her to the then-fledgling digital side of the business, it afforded her valuable perspective on the need for teamwork in every media and marketing setting.

“I learned a lot about different personalities. I got my hands dirty,” she notes.

Rourke shifted to the account side of the business for her final two years with WPP, then worked her way into positions of increasing responsibility at Havas Life New York and Eveo. It was during her five-year stint at Klick Health, however, where she honed her digital and leadership chops. Her former Klick colleague Mark Makuch, now EVP, CX strategy at Havas Health Network, remembers her as a “unicorn,” the rare individual whose people skills matched her technical ones.

“When you’re on an agency team, there’s always one person who’s the point of contact with the client, and you rely on that person to be the voice of the client within your organization,” he explains. “Jess always knew what the client asks and needs were, and she had such an easy way of instilling confidence… There was never any need for heroics because she was running everything so well.”

Rourke remembers her time at Klick as pivotal to her development as a leader and strategist. She became what she calls “an active and engaged listener,” as well as a true believer in the company’s push toward “addressable omnichannel.”

“Everything needs to be about messages that count and matter. Billboards on the side of I-95 saying ‘prescribe this’ don’t work,” she explains.

Migraine meds and motherhood 

Rourke’s Klick tenure was in large part defined by the launch of Biohaven’s blockbuster migraine medicine Nurtec ODT, an assignment that cropped up as Covid ravaged North America – and just a few months after Rourke had returned from maternity leave. It was an all-encompassing endeavor that included label creation, regulatory back-and-forth with the Food and Drug Administration and the minutiae of product packaging.

The launch proved a wild success, but its pace and scale burned Rourke out. “It was the hardest I ever worked in my life and I’m so proud of what we accomplished. But I was putting in 80-hour weeks and flying when I probably should’ve been feeding my daughter,” she says.

That might have been why Rourke responded so positively to her first interview with Doceree chief client officer Kamya Elawadhi, during which the exec’s infant daughter rested happily in a nearby bassinet. The company was small at the time but had big ambitions; its four-strong customer success team has since grown to more than 20, with Rourke playing a pivotal part in its evolution.

“From the day she got here, there was a real sense of ownership,” Elawadhi says, pointing to the onboarding and learning profiles for all CS team members that Rourke created from scratch. “She was thinking about growing the business, but also about growing the function… She always contributes more than expected.”

Rourke, for her part, embraces the responsibility that comes with her expanding role. Asked to identify a Doceree program of which she’s especially proud, Rourke instead points to the recent promotions of two members of her team. “It made my time here feel so much more valuable. It means a lot that I can help somebody grow their confidence and knowledge.”

Rourke says she hasn’t given her future much thought, beyond wanting to remain in a data-centric role in or around healthcare. A self-described “Philly girl tried and true” who spends her Sundays in Eagles green, she cherishes her role as a mother of two daughters.

“Out of all the jobs in the world, being a mom is my favorite,” she says. “It’s rewarding and fun and it’s sometimes punishing, but I find it amazing what raising kids brings out in you.”

Rourke is clearly buoyed by Doceree’s continued growth and her contributions to it, but believes she’s best suited to a role like the one she currently occupies. “I don’t aspire to be a CEO. I don’t think I’ll ever be a head honcho or somebody who’s always in the limelight,” she stresses. “I just want to help mentor generations to come. I want to do whatever I can to make the pharma-tech space an even better place.”

Which isn’t to say that Rourke views that particular charge as an easy lift. “There’s so much data out there that’s not placed in the right hands,” she continues. “But data doesn’t lie. Science doesn’t lie. As an industry, we can do this.”

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