Entouch is a company that facillitates MRs smooth communication with doctors by connecting them either online or on the phone. We sat down with the President and Representative Director, Marty Roberts, to talk about why he started the business, features of the service, and his vision for the company’s future.

Marty Roberts graduated from Hofstra University with a PhD in Clinical Psychology. Former President of Cegedim Japan, He currently works in the health care industry as a data and software service leader. He founded Entouch in August of 2015.

Read Part 1 here.

One of your key contributions to the Entouch enterprise is your unique and flexible approach. How do you think this will affect stakeholders?

Marty Roberts (A.k.a Marty): We are hoping our business will become a Win-Win platform for the following 4 groups. To provide a flexible working style for MRs, to deliver reliable and up to date medical information to doctors who have difficultly finding time to spare during the day, pharmaceutical company who desire a closer relationship with doctors to ensure their needs are met, and finally to act upon the Japanese government’s desire to improve opportunities for women. I believe that our company is able to impact these 4 groups by providing solutions to their problems. After applying to the governments’ entrepreneur support group with our future business propositions, we were able to obtain financing from the Japan Finance Corporation. I believe it is because they believed in the social impact the service would have. 

You are now at the stage where you want to expand your network of medical partners. What plans do you have for this stage?

Marty: Currently our main way of reaching out to new doctors and medical partners is by advertisements that appear on the website. To increase medical partner registrants, we have started contacting pre-retired MR’s at pharmaceutical companies to have them assist in the registration process. Additionally, we are also recruiting from employment agencies. As I mentioned before, these pharmaceutical companies that hired MR’s as full time employees currently have no choice but to cut back on MRs. Therefore, there are many people who are looking for positions that allow them to utilize the experience they have gained as MRs, so I believe obtaining medical partners is not such a big problem.

However, what I do feel to be problematic is that many people do not want to work full-time, but rather, like SOHO, want to work from home, essentially outsourcing on a contract base. Moreover, we only recruit those who meet our registration and specialization standards. One of the main advantages of our model is that you can work according to your lifestyle or life plan. By emphasizing this point to our target audience, we hope to gain more interested candidates. 

Lastly, can you tell us about your future vision for Entouch?

Marty: Our mid-to-long term aim is to become the No.1 platform for not only doctors, MRs, and pharmaceutical companies, but to also connect health care providers with patients worldwide. Specifically, we hope to continue to offer educational programs to doctors, create a network of support for fellow patients, and develop specialized medical equipment that better meets the needs of women by cooperating openly with other companies.

Our short term focus aims to building upon and strengthen the foundation of our company during the next year. We plan to test our service by launching a pilot project this summer. Through this we hope that doctors and medical partners alike can experience and understand the advantages of our service.

Our immediate goal is to expand the boundaries of our project by incorporating their requests and opinions to further build upon our successful initiatives. To become a company that doctors and pharmaceutical companies depend on, we believe it is important to recruit Japans top MRs, ensure a wide variety of specialized knowledge, and create a strong team of medical partnerships. We currently have 30 registered medical partners, which we hope to increase to 50 during this year. 

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