Moving Digital Health, Episode 28: Arielle Smith of Event Cadence

Our guest this episode is Arielle Smith, Vice President of Growth at Event Cadence. Arielle joined Reuben Hall to delve into her unique career journey from her initial pursuit of medical school to her shift into the digital health sector, and the evolution of Event Cadence from a startup to a pivotal player in healthcare event management.

“They have multiple teams all interested in meeting with the same person. Well, if those teams aren’t effectively communicating with one another, let’s say three, four, five different people are all going to reach out to the same health care provider ultimately asking the same question. That in turn frustrates health care providers for obvious reasons. And it also does not make the organization look all that great.” Arielle Smith on the biggest pain point that leads organizations to Event Cadence.

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Read Transcript:

Reuben (00:01)
Welcome to the MindSea podcast series, Moving Digital Health. Our guest today is Arielle Smith, Vice President of Growth at Event Cadence, an event management platform serving the healthcare industry. Thanks for joining us today, Arielle.

Arielle Smith (00:16)
Thank you for having me.

Reuben (00:18)
Could you start off with telling us a bit about your background?

Arielle Smith (00:21)
Sure. It’s kind of a loaded question because I feel like I’ve bounced around a little bit. luckily for this podcast enough, I’ve always kind of stuck within the health care and then pharma space. But at one point, I thought I wanted to go into medicine and an actual med school. So was planning for that for quite some time. I then did some work, spent some time at a biotech lab. And all while studying and kind of

prepping for what I thought was going to be medical school. My path just changed one day. I was in a Starbucks and a gentleman walked over to me. So I was studying for my MCATs and just simply asked me, know, are you, would you be interested in exploring a job? And at that time it was to basically sell software that helped pharmaceutical employees learn their therapy or drug or device, whatever they were.

intern selling. I decided why not. I went into New York. kind of observed for the day and I legitimately fell in love with it. I decided not to go down the medical school path at all. I think there was always something in the back of my mind saying, know, don’t do it. You don’t want to do this. But I, yeah, so I took the job. That is not where I’m at today. That is not the same company. We can get into that, but that’s just basically what led me to my path to

Reuben (01:30)
Wow.

Arielle Smith (01:50)
technology. But yeah, it’s always kind of been under the umbrella of healthcare and pharma.

Reuben (01:56)
Okay, so really kind of a random run in that turns you off in a new direction there. But you mentioned like you started off with medicine and there’s obviously a passion there. Maybe tell us about like what was it about that that really drew you to health?

Arielle Smith (02:00)
very much so.

I mean everybody, everybody typically has that story and unfortunately for me, mean mine’s the sadder of the two where I was always interested in medicine. I think some people just naturally go into medicine because of the puzzle and the unknown. That absolutely was there for me, but more so the pull was my mom got sick when I was young and for a while it was this back and forth of just a total mystery of why is she sick.

Reuben (02:35)
Mm

Arielle Smith (02:48)
what’s going on. She ended up passing away. And very, very long story short, it turned out that what she passed away from was something that could have been prevented or just addressed if it would have been caught. That obviously fueled a fire in me. And that coupled with the honest interest of medicine, that’s ultimately why I decided to embark on that path.

Reuben (03:03)
wow.

Mm -hmm. Yeah, that’s so hard when it happens when you’re so young. But you’re right. It’s reason a lot of people get into medicine and health, because they have those experience with close family members and want to use their life to make a difference and make it better for other people. So that’s certainly to be commended.

Arielle Smith (03:21)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Reuben (03:43)
So tell us about Event Cadence. I know you were one of the first people at the company there while it being founded. How did that come together?

Arielle Smith (03:52)
Yeah, so, Rewinding now to the story that I just told about the gentleman who introduced me to all of this. that was my foot in the door with all of it. at the time it was considered a, a side com agency, that was doing more agency style work. but it was all kind of under the context of software development for whatever a company may need.

And I don’t know, I found a passion for technology. I’m kind of paraphrasing here now, but that company then transitioned into another company, which had very similar clientele, similar needs, but started more so exploring a more SaaS like model. And then that company ultimately folded. With that fold.

Reuben (04:44)
Mm

Arielle Smith (04:49)
the opportunity for founders to come in, purchase the code that I had been working with. I was a customer facing representative at the time. knew the platform very well. Co -founders stepped in, bought the code, spun up their own business. And I knew those co -founders from my past experience at those companies. They asked me to be the first customer facing hire. So I

was very eager and happy to have that type of role back in my life. So I accepted happily. And that was at this point over seven years ago, and I’ve been with the company ever since.

Reuben (05:31)
Well, excellent. So out of the ashes of one company, the best was preserved and able to grow into something new, which is amazing. We work with a lot of startups and companies of different sizes. And it’s really hard to see when things don’t work out, especially for all the developers. So many lines of code, so much effort put into building a product.

Arielle Smith (05:35)
Exactly.

Yes. Yes. Yep. Yep.

Reuben (06:01)
And then having that fold and just be put on the shelf is always hard to see. But if it can be reborn into something else, then that’s a great outcome. So how have things progressed over the years at Event Cadence?

Arielle Smith (06:08)
Resurrected, yep.

Yeah, I was. Yeah.

Yeah, so I mean, it’s, you know, it’s, we were hit right at that time of COVID. So that’s a, COVID is a very defining moment for us. We were, the company was founded just before COVID, would say early side of 2017. So we had been around, we had been established for a few years, but you know, we were very, very small.

most of the business at that point that we were conducting was through a partnership of ours, who through that partnership, we were able to gain traction with the accounts that we have today. But in those early years, we really only had one, if not two clients. And in tandem with them, we built this platform that we know today is Event Cadence. And that is why I truly,

like to encourage really that we are built on the backbone of healthcare and pharmaceuticals. With that being said, when COVID struck, it’s no surprise that big organizations like pharmaceutical companies are no longer traveling for events in person. So with that being said, we took a big, big hit.

Up until then, our platform was designed to service the needs for employees who are attending in person, industry conferences or internal events. And when that took a turn, you know, we felt that immediate, you know, gut wrenching pang of what are we going to do? But we were small, we were limber and we managed to, you know, spin up a

commercial web page and website to really showcase our features in a different way to make them a virtual, to make them into a virtual model, essentially. You can still have events, but let’s do it online. And here are all the features and functionality that are still applicable for that reason. Well, interestingly enough, we did see that healthcare and pharma for us and our purposes got very sleepy, very slow, but all these other industries started coming to the table.

they needed help with their now or then rather virtual events. So we saw everything from university events to entertainment events to nonprofits to just really it ran the gamut and which was great for us but we actually grew during COVID because we catered to all these other industries that needed the help that were outside of our day -to -day of pharma.

Reuben (08:49)
Mm

Arielle Smith (09:12)
That of course lasted for a year and a half, if not two years. And then by 2022, I would say, I then saw the pharma and the healthcare industry really just, the pendulum swung the other way. They were back full force into it. And at that point in time, in 2022, we had to make a really hard decision as a company. had to decide, who do we wanna be? What do we wanna do? We have been catering to these other industries for so long.

And now we’re recognizing that our healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, accounts partners are back. We need to pick a lane because we were being pulled in many, many, too many, frankly, directions. So we decided to move back to healthcare and pharma. mean, it’s how we started. It’s what we know. It’s what we do best. And it’s truly what we’re all passionate about. So that leads me now to, course, today.

where we’ve kind of sunset, if you will, working with those other industries and verticals. We’ve put our focus back towards healthcare and pharma and really making sure that we’re hitting on their needs.

Reuben (10:24)
So maybe you could talk about the differences in how you, healthcare pharma event versus another industry. Like what specifically, how do you cater to healthcare to give them the best experience?

Arielle Smith (10:40)
Yeah. So great question. Thank you. our, our bread and butter, when it comes to, when you think of like all the different types of events that are out there that frankly, any organization could participate in our bread and butter is specifically industry conferences for the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector. We can also help with internal meetings like sales summits or point of action meetings. We definitely do that.

But really we see the need within the industry space, the industry conference space rather. So really the distinction is when a pharmaceutical organization approaches us for our work, it’s to create a very, very tailored experience for their employee attending said conference. So you can kind of think of like our platform, I’m just going to use ASCO as an example. It’s the largest oncology conference in America.

happens every June in Chicago. Our platform is not producing or delivering the ASCO experience for the thousands of attendees that are attending. Our platform is providing a very unique experience for a pharmaceutical company that’s attending. So it’s very, very tailored to why they decide to send their employees to an ASCO.

Reuben (11:52)
Okay.

Arielle Smith (12:09)
because I’m just gonna throw out some names. The reason that AstraZeneca may send employees to ASCO is gonna be different than why Merck would send employees to ASCO. Sure, the overarching goals are the same, but the way to actually maximize or get the ROI of sending those people are gonna be different. There’s different purposes, there’s different objectives. So we could be theoretically working with both parties, but when we create the event experience for

AZ in that case, it’s going to look different than when Merck is interacting with our platform, if that makes sense.

Reuben (12:46)
Yeah, okay. So Event Cadence is really an attendee management platform as opposed to like a conference delivery platform.

Arielle Smith (12:58)
Correct, exactly.

Reuben (13:00)
So let’s say one of these pharma companies is sending a whole bunch of different employees in different roles. Do the different roles get different experiences as well? to what level do you tailor?

Arielle Smith (13:14)
Yep, nope, you nailed it. So a medical, let’s say a US medical field rep might log in to Event Cadence and yes, have a very different experience than maybe their marketing counterpoint would. Their materials might be different. The action items and the steps that they need to take prior to the event might be different. The people that they’re

planning to meet with their HCPs that they’re planning to engage with at a medical conference might be different. So we really just, we take quite a bit of time at the beginning of every project to really do a deep dive with our accounts to understand the goals and the objectives of the event in general. And to your point, your question, it’s going to differ between teams. The medical team is going to have different reasons for sending their employees than the marketing team will.

There might be some overlap and there very likely is and then that’s part of why they come to us in the first place to help navigate what that overlap is. But yes, in short, end users can have different experiences based on the teams that they work with.

Reuben (14:28)
And every conference these days has the app to go with it, to see the schedule and see other attendees. So do you have to integrate in the backend with each conference to pull in that data to your platform?

Arielle Smith (14:49)
Yep, exactly. So integrations are a big buzzword, hot topic in our line of work. We can integrate with many, many different portals and platforms. Again, whatever the needs are, we work through. But specifically to answer your question, yes, I mean, of course, every industry conference is going to have a schedule of their own. That is why they’re partially why they’re hosting that.

industry conference to begin with. It’s because data has been released, announced, and it needs to be educated on. So we take that information and we build it natively into our platform. So ASCO will release their schedule. It will be thousands of sessions and we will take those sessions and we will build them in natively into our platform. Now, when you look at it that way, the ASCO platform

in that given moment is identical to ours, right? So, okay, then why have your platform? Well, selling plug here, because if a, I’m gonna use AZ again, thanks guys, in the event that an AZ team member accesses the ASCO platform, that app is never going to show that AZ user what is relevant for them.

Reuben (15:48)
Mm

Arielle Smith (16:10)
What is relevant for AstraZeneca of all the thousands of sessions? What is, what’s relevant for AZ? What are the high priorities? What are the medium priorities? Which of those sessions is, does AZ plan to send a team member to for the write up or debrief purpose of attending in the first place, right? The ASCO app is never going to say that it’s not personalized. That’s what we, that’s where we come in.

So yes, we have the whole ASCO schedule built, but then we’re gonna work with AZ or we’re gonna work with whatever third party planning team they use to do that competitive intelligence. And we take that information and we build it into our schedule. So they’re gonna know upon logging in, if I’m a medical representative, here are the sessions that are high priority for me to attend. And maybe even a step forward to say, I have to attend one, right?

And then that is going to be in my schedule as this trumps that kind of thing, where the platform is then intelligent enough to not allow or at least give the visibility and warning upfront when other team members try and interact with that person at that given time. So there’s a lot of different things swirling around the platform. But again, I just, in the short time we have, I’m trying to go back to it’s incredibly personalized for that person and then taking a step out for the organization.

Reuben (17:35)
For sure, and are you kind of matching individuals with events and schedules just kind of, you know, based on some general criteria or is it really like human like curated? There’s an individual that’s going through and kind of hand picking things.

Arielle Smith (17:57)
Yeah, so great question. Right now, it’s the latter. It’s either happening in -house within the actual organization. They might have a dedicated role that legitimately goes through all of these sessions and decides, based on other knowledge, of course, what’s important. in most times, frankly, what I see when working with accounts is that they’ll hire a

sidecom agency that to do that work for them, frankly. And then we work with that agency directly to just simply get the information and build the information. There’s no AI happening, let’s say, that is placing people where and making recommendations. It’s right now, it’s very manual.

Reuben (18:51)
Fair enough. Don’t have to use AI for everything. sometimes it’s certainly the human touch is appreciated there. So I think everyone kind of struggles with the ROI on conferences. It’s really expensive for travel costs, sending a person over if you’re sending a team over to a conference. It’s really expensive.

Arielle Smith (18:54)
Yeah.

Reuben (19:20)
How are healthcare organizations looking at the ROI and how does event cadence help to measure whether this was worth it? Like should we go back again next year or maybe skip this one, do something else?

Arielle Smith (19:36)
Yeah, great question. I love this question. Thank you for asking it. The biggest way that we help with that, with the ROI there, is it really boils down to engagements with HCPs. Because I mean, at the end of the day, that is ultimately how these organizations are advancing their business. Yes, it is helpful to sit in on a session from a competitor and learn

whatever that competitor is willing to share at that given time. Sure, that gives it somewhat of a competitive edge and you can kind of take that and run with it. But at the end of the day, these industry conferences put so, so much weight and effort, frankly, around connecting pharmaceutical organizations with HCPs. So with that being said, these companies will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their people there, put their people up,

and pay for meeting room spaces to have these engagements occur. Well, how are you measuring that to your point? So this is in a multitude of ways, but I use the bread and butter term. I’m gonna use it again, I’m sorry. But when it comes to actual feature sets with all the features that we offer, again, our bread and butter is really the appointment feature suite. And that is in the most simplest terms,

connecting a pharmaceutical employee or a healthcare organizational employee with an external HCP. They use our platform to communicate with their HCPs, schedule meetings with their HCPs, and then track those engagements over time. So in a way, it’s a little CRM -like, but we also, know, there are different, there are different, slightly different space at the same time. Point being is,

A lot of these companies are, well, not all of them, frankly, are going to be interested in, okay, of all of the meeting rooms that we rented, of all of the theoretical times that we had to engage with our HCPs, what happened? What did it look like? Right? Who met with who? How often was the room utilized? Who actually showed up to the meeting and what was actually discussed? All of these things.

are not only captured in the platform in real time as they’re happening, but the lead up, the planning is all done in the platform itself as well. So all of the communication, all of the scheduling is happening in event cadence and team members have access to this at any given moment. They can log in, they can see where their organization is at high level. We have a thousand confirmed appointments.

And then of course they could drill down to see, how many appointments do we have to talk about therapy A with the marketing team, right? All of these different things can be really fine tuned and tweaked so that the end user can get to exactly what they need to see. But bigger picture, all of this data is super, super beneficial and helpful for the organization after the fact so that they can properly scope and plan for the years ahead.

I mean, I can’t tell you how many times before working with an account, accounts would just arbitrarily decide, you know, we need six meeting rooms. These meeting rooms are ridiculously expensive. I still can’t believe how expensive they are, but they are ridiculously expensive. And they would just arbitrarily say, you know, I think we need six meeting rooms based on the five conversations that I had with people. Well, in reality, only two of those rooms were heavily utilized and maybe a third was kind of used as overflow.

They’re never going to know that unless they plan, you know, and really, really utilize, just basically have their own method of mapping this out. The platform sets you up and does all of that for you essentially. So, I mean, that’s by far the biggest way that we’ve helped, we’ve helped organizations with their bottom line. And the other thing I’ll say, which is not incredibly directly related, but it is,

indirectly related in the sense that as simple as this sounds, these big companies have, I’ll say, I hate to use the word issues, but they have potential perception issues. And what I mean by that is a large organization could want to potentially meet with the same HCP

because they have multiple teams all interested in meeting with the same person. Well, if those teams aren’t effectively communicating with one another, let’s say three, four, five different people are all going to reach out to the same HCP ultimately asking the same question. That in turn frustrates HCPs for obvious reasons. And it also does not make the organization look all that great. So the

Reuben (24:49)
Yeah.

Arielle Smith (24:55)
Like the number one pain point that I hear why organizations find us frankly in the first place is not because of we need to know the activity that’s happening in the meeting rooms. That’s like an afterthought when they figure that out that they have that information. It’s great. The reason that they come to us is we need help with our perception. We need to look better in front of our HCPs. We need to look like we know what we’re doing and have our ish together.

when we go to this individual. So that by far is what the biggest selling point is for us.

Reuben (25:33)
Okay, interesting. Well, I’m learning a lot about events, specifically in pharma and how those work. Now, often when you’re collecting a lot of data during an event or something like that, it can be overwhelming to try and go back afterwards and find out, okay, what are the insights from this data? How do I make logical conclusions or…

get any information from it. So like the meeting room example you talked about, is that something that event cadence would surface? Like, hey, you have underutilized meeting rooms and you need to adjust that for the next event? Or like, how does all that data then get translated into actions after the fact?

Arielle Smith (26:25)
Totally. Yeah, I’ll give you two examples and one I’ll use yours. Yes, at the end of the event, we always conduct a debrief. Part of that debrief will naturally to be a room analysis. So we’ll take all of the rooms, all of the theoretical times that the rooms could be accessed and utilized. And then we’ll break it down based on how often the room was utilized, how often it was not utilized. And then we’ll even go a step further to say,

of the confirmed meetings that we had, how many actually occurred, because we can capture that information as well. So we do all this, we present this analysis to our organizations and we basically make the recommendation to say, okay, you’ve been working with us now for the past three years. These are the trends that we’ve seen. We’ll either then recommend to go up in a room, to go down in a room.

potentially they can do a half day, if it’s gonna save them a nice chunk of change. So yes, we’ll absolutely help with that analysis that’s built into our process. Another example I could give you is it revolves around materials and material distribution. So the example I could give would be a verbal response document. There could be a verbal response document that is put together

And the intention is before you step foot into the exhibit booth, you need to read this. You need to know XYZ talking points for compliance reasons or whatever that might be. We’ll add that to our platform. We’ll send it to the respective people that need to read it. And then we’ll track who actually opens it, who actually reads it. And we’ll be able to follow back up with the organization to let them know, know, of the 10 people that you needed to read this, only eight of them did.

they’ll know who that person, who those people are, if they so choose, and if that’s part of the framework. But that can also then help to structure who are the most appropriate people to be on site, who is ultimately following protocol and who is not. And that all, again, stems to the bottom line at the end of the day.

Reuben (28:41)
Okay, so we definitely hear some of the stories there and the practical uses. What are some of the top success stories where organization A used event cadence and got this result? What are some of those big wins that you’ve seen in the past?

Arielle Smith (29:06)
sure.

would say, I know we’re talking a lot about, you know, money, the bottom line, of course, everything revolves around that, whether we want it to or not. But what really makes me happy, frankly, is when the that true, like we we’ve done it feeling is not because of money or the money that we saved. Because it’s more so because of the relationships that

they feel that have been strengthened. So most of our success stories from what I hear are twofold. One, it’s very, very positive remarks from the HCP back to the organization to say thank you for respecting my time. It’s a big one and that goes so far with these organizations, which then gets back to us, which is why I’m saying

Reuben (29:59)
Yeah, that’s the big one.

Arielle Smith (30:08)
That makes me really happy because it’s not necessarily money related. It’s strengthening the relationship, which makes me very happy. So thank you for respecting my time. Thank you ultimately, you know, for having your ducks in a row approaching me with very clear reasons and having the conversation in a very outlined, clear fashion. When we will sometimes conduct surveys at the end, we’ll send them to the HCPs and when those companies get

high ratings back from the HCPS, it’s like, you know, we couldn’t have done our job any better. So that’s awesome for us. The other answer that I’d like to give you is gonna be down to efficiency and time. Another big win for us is when we hear from our end users that we saved them time. And a big way of doing this

is again going back to the HCP scheduling functionality that we have. We’ve built a feature that ultimately allows them to send their HCP an invite and that invite is going to query a bunch of dates and times all while looking on the back end at certain criteria. What are the rooms that are available in that moment? What are the required people that who are the required people that have to be there?

It’s then going to query outlook at the same time it’s querying event cadence. So there’s all these things happening in the background that saves a lot of time than just going back and forth. Can you meet at 10? no, that’s already taken. Okay, what about 11? Like all of that back and forthness is saved within minutes with what we’ve helped to build and establish. I mean, our end users love it because they just feel like their job.

has been made so much easier where they don’t feel like they’re playing admin and they can actually get back to doing what they were hired to do, which is also a really nice thing to hear.

Reuben (32:14)
Excellent. So you must work very closely with the organizations putting on the conference because you need that level of technical integration. And also if there’s any changes, like you must be updating things on the fly. Talk about some of the relationships you’ve built with the conference providers.

Arielle Smith (32:40)
Yeah, so interestingly enough, our closer relationships are really with agency partners who will also offer HCP scheduling services. We offer that too, it’s an arm, but we have partners that will also provide that if they…

Reuben (32:57)
Okay.

Arielle Smith (33:06)
let’s put it this way, they see the platform and they’re like, yes, we need to use this. So the organization might use our software, but they may already have their agency that they want to perform the HCP engagement schedule in. So we work very well with agencies like that. But we also, and probably more so, partner very closely with logistics companies. So these big logistics companies are ultimately the companies responsible for

coordinating everything when an account like a Merc attends ASCO. They’re booking the flights, they’re booking the hotels, they’re booking the rooms, they’re making sure all the people need to be where they need to be and when they need to be there. And then for compliance reasons, they’re reporting it all back. We work very closely with them because they use our software, frankly, and I haven’t noted this, but they use our software differently, I’m sure you can imagine, than a pharma.

end user would use it. They’re using it more for the logistics arm of their business and what they do. So we partner very closely with big logistic companies. Because you know, we’re very, you know, we’re adjacent to one another, if you will. But we’ve just naturally found, you know, servicing and working with the pharmaceutical companies themselves, we’ve just naturally found this, this

Reuben (34:19)
Mm -hmm.

Arielle Smith (34:34)
symbiotic relationship with logistic companies. So I would say by far it’s the logistic companies that we are the closest with.

Reuben (34:41)
Okay, interesting. And then are there any like big upcoming events that you’re really focused on or gearing up for right now?

Arielle Smith (34:51)
Yeah, so when we first got started, just interestingly enough got into the oncology space. I’m very excited and happy to say that in the past couple years, we started working with other spaces within, you know, just the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry in general. But I’m saying all of this because an upcoming event that we’re working on is ESMO. It is the European version of

the ASCO that I was referencing earlier. It happens in Europe every year. It’s the largest oncology conference. And we are very much gearing up for that. We have quite a few accounts that we will be working with this year at ESMO. But I’m alluding to the fact that we are starting, we’re starting to work with other spaces, other therapies, other tumor areas, which is very, very exciting. So throughout the rest of this year, and then definitely into 2025,

we’re starting to explore different industry conferences that we’ve never really been a part of before. things like our spaces like neurology, eye care. Yeah, so I’m excited to see what that looks like.

Reuben (36:08)
very exciting. Well, it’s been very interesting to learn about your specific niche of the healthcare industry. There’s so many different companies, different organizations that help the whole machine work and progress and evolve, help the relationships happen. And yeah, so it’s really interesting and great to hear your story.

Arielle Smith (36:37)
Thank you. Appreciate it.

Reuben (36:39)
And thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thanks to everyone else who’s listening to the Moving Digital Health podcast. If you enjoyed the conversation, please go to movingdigitalhealth .com to subscribe to the MindSea newsletter and be notified about future episodes.

Arielle Smith (36:43)
Thank you.

Originally published at https://mindsea.com on September 12, 2024.