The vivacious Shero, Dr Namrata Singh, founded Turacoz Group – a global medical communication entity in 2014, with centres in different continents.
The entity has made a mark offering impeccable services across diverse verticals in healthcare writing and communication. Some snippets of the interview.
What led to the concept of medical communication and setting up of TuracozGroup?
I am an accidental entrepreneur! I credit my husband for motivating me to start my own enterprise, Turacoz, to overcome the hassle of juggling family and career in an environment, which was not compassionate to women by not offering flexible working hours. After my Post Graduation specialization in Paediatrics from Sir Gangaram Hospital, New Delhi, I returned to my home town Meerut. Disillusioned by the medical scenario, I went to Australia for a short course. Keen on trying something else, an acquaintance introduced me to technology and medical communication. I soon got my first written assignment for a market research company based in San Francisco, USA. My interest in the field grew. Meantime, we moved from Meerut to Delhi in 2011-12 and after a brief stint as a consultant, I launched my company Turacoz, where I ensured to implement women-friendly policies, especially for those residing in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, whose true potential is invariably lost or underutilised.
The initial 2-3 years for Turacoz were challenging. I focused on metro cities and got our first account, Dr Reddy’s, then Astra Zeneca, Cipla and many others. However, I realised early the need to explore the global market to be in the business beginning with Dubai followed by an entity in Singapore, in 2018.
What is the gap that you see in the dissemination of information to all stakeholders?
My experience as a doctor has definitely helped me in positioning the services that our company could provide. I realised the need to provide value to the doctor instead of the brand by providing them with more information and facilitate them in things such as research and to publish their papers, which they are unable to do being preoccupied in their practice. We step in to fill this gap. To ensure that pharma automatically comes on board, we resorted to reverse engineering focusing on educating doctors and the patients. The other gap is that those who are into medical writing and medical communications, may necessarily not come from a medical background. We train them.
As an experienced paediatrician, how has it helped you build a strong content and activity based Group, driven by technology?
In the early days of Turacoz, we were only building more of scientific content, something I leveraged to build on from my experience as a medical writer in publications, and medical education. But as we grew, we started getting diverse requirements from the pharma. So as a service providing company, we had to innovate to stay in the race. Especially, during Covid in 2019, when a lot of digital communication demand came from the pharma industry for small videos and med bytes to engage with the doctors. The other vertical to come up was training, which are paid certificate courses for trained writers.
How did your Group prove to be a strong support during the Covid pandemic?
Covid proved to be another milestone for us! It was in 2019 that we decided to open a subsidiary of Turacoz in the Netherlands. Soon after the lockdown in April, we helped doctors to enhance their research, besides preparing a lot of communication on our social page to counter misinformation in the public, among doctors and the pharma. We also focused on training doctors while waiting for approval of our application submitted to the Netherland authorities, which eventually came through in October 2020.
How is Indian skill-set perceived in the Global Capability Centre?
After the Covid pandemic, the global geo-economic dynamics witnessed a change with India emerging as a strong economic hub with immense talent. Considered as a centre of excellence by big multi-national companies, they have set up their offices in different cities of the country. Today, work is outsourced to agencies like us by these Global Capabilities Centres.
Truacoz is working with 3-4 centres of excellence in India, who are among our largest clients.
We can envision remarkable growth happening in the industry and medical communication, which is a boon for all stakeholders such as decision makers, policy makers, reimbursements, insurance companies. With protocols of the regulatory agencies getting tougher and data transparency becoming mandatory, our role as a responsible medical communicators becomes significant.
How do you see Turacoz Group leading the way for equitable work opportunities for women encouraging their increased participation in healthcare industry?
At Turacoz, 80-85 percent of our employees are women. The age 25 to 45 years is a critical period for career women, especially married ones, who are very often compelled to quit their jobs to tend to their families. I ensure that women, who want to get back to work after a break, have flexible work hour options. It is very important for women to balance home and career to ensure to stay in the system and build their professional network. To be a professional should be mandatory for women and not a choice!
