2005 was a turning point, and also a heartbreaking year for Mihai Irimescu. When his mother passed away after years of battling cancer, he began to approach life with a new sense of purpose. One result was a decision to switch his career focus from telecoms and information technology to healthcare.
The two professional spheres might seem very different but they have been overlapping more and more in recent years. That has given the Romanian professional an opportunity to play a vital role in promoting digital health solutions at the Swiss multinational healthcare company Roche.
"We were quite shocked as a family, because the doctors said that she had about five to six months to live," he tells Asia Focus, recalling the initial prognosis for his mother. "But she was a big fighter at the end. She managed to survive around five years."
"That was the moment when I thought I wanted to do something more to help people and to save their lives. That was when [the idea of joining] a pharmaceutical and healthcare company came up," says Mr Irimescu, currently the head of Asian emerging markets at Roche Diabetes Care (RDC), based in Bangkok.
Mr Irimescu, now 42, started his career by working in sales and financial management for a telecom firm based in his home country. He moved to Norway in 2006 to work for a search engine company, which was the time that he also had to deal with the loss of his mother.
A year and a half , he decided to join Novo Nordisk, a major multinational pharmaceutical company, taking up a position in Paris before relocating to Copenhagen. His role was to develop global pricing strategies for diabetes and haemostasis care products and services, until he was assigned to Bangkok in 2015 as the company's general manager for Thailand.
With more than a decade in the pharmaceutical field, he had gained considerable experience in diabetes care by the time he joined RDC in 2019. In his new position, he has found his background in IT and telecoms has returned to play an important role.
RDC has been a pioneer in integrated personalised diabetes management solutions that integrate digital technologies into healthcare products and services. This reflects Roche's overall vision to capture opportunities from the rising demand for digital healthcare.
This demand has become far more evident during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, as the necessity of social distancing means more patients require remote care.
TAPPING INTO TECH
The role of Mr Irimescu at RDC is to oversee the provision of diabetes management solutions to 13 emerging markets: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.
"Our focus is on helping patients to manage their disease better. What happens when you have diabetes is that, initially, you won't have a lot of symptoms," he explains.
"The more the disease progresses, the more complications you start to get if you don't keep your blood glucose in control. It costs society a lot of money to treat patients, plus the cost of losing workforces to the disease."
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 422 million people worldwide have diabetes, and 1.6 million die each year due to the disease. The majority live in low- and middle-income countries.
Defining himself as a tech-savvy person, Mr Irimescu is highly aware of the benefits of digital solutions in easing the burden on patients and improving their quality of life.
His engagement with digital health applications extends to his daily life. He uses a distance tracker as he runs marathons, and a blood pressure monitoring app as part of his quest to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
On his travels to the countries under his responsibility, he has found that digital solutions help local people to close the gap in healthcare access, and address the disparity between urban and rural areas.
The ubiquity of smartphones and greatly improved internet access in the region have also given rise to a new trend: personalised care that can be very precisely targeted based on the huge amounts of health data that physicians now have at their disposal.
"People are not all apples or oranges," notes Mr Irimescu. "The thing about diabetes is that every day you have to make so many decisions: what you will eat, how much you will exercise, when to sleep, take your insulin, and other drugs."
To help diabetes patients make the right choices, RDC offers blood glucose monitoring devices and a mobile application that helps patients record their consumption and blood glucose measurements. It also offers software that helps physicians monitor patients' real-time data sent from their mobile phones.
CULTIVATING COLLABORATION
Overseeing several emerging markets at differing stages of development is a challenging task. For Mr Irimescu, the key is to understand customers' problems in each country and cultivate transboundary collaboration.
"First of all, you must listen to their problems and understand their needs," he says. "Secondly, you rely on your experience or some examples from other advancing and more experienced countries, then suggest to them, 'How about trying this?'"
Mr Irimescu usually pairs up an RDC team in one country with another in a less-developed country, so they can share experiences and learn about different aspects of each other's markets as well as cultures.
Through this collaboration, both teams develop a better understanding of customers and can deliver the right products and services to where they are needed.
Such collaboration, he says, has become even more important during the Covid pandemic.
For example, public-private partnerships have been formed to run telemedicine services in Thai hospitals so that patients can avoid the risk of coronavirus transmission. RDC has joined this partnership by connecting its blood glucose monitoring devices to existing telehealth platforms.
"Big progress in human society happens when there's a big event that people find to be a big challenge, and they come up with solutions. It's the same with Covid, sometimes you need this type of event for authorities, governments and even private companies to make a move," he says.
"We need each other. You can't be the best in all fields. You can be the best in one or two, and let the others who are most advanced be the best in the other ones."
His passion for Asia is one of the reasons that keeps him enthusiastic about collaborating with customers and colleagues from different backgrounds.
"I'm always been fascinated by Asia. Everything here -- cultures, religions and values. In Europe, where I come from, the culture is very assertive. Everybody is about myself, while in Asia, it's about US," he says with emphasis.
"Even in our team. When I come [to the office] in the morning, I will know if something wrong has happened. I know because of the way people [interact with each other].
"When the situation is normal, people talk to each other. When something happens, let's say there is a fight between the two of them, they are quiet. In Thailand, people suffer for each other, in the way they create their own attitudes and their own vibe by adjusting to the group."
Mr Irimescu visited Asia together with his wife in 2011. They travelled through Malaysia and other countries including Thailand, where he says he had a premonition that he would be back again.
After he flew back to Europe, he started looking for an opportunity to work in Asia, until his previous employer offered him a position in Bangkok. Asia has positively changed him, he says. His friends in Europe observed him becoming calmer, listening more, and having more balanced opinions.
REPUTATION IS EVERYTHING
For Mr Irimescu, reputation is critical in the pharmaceutical field as it is concerned with human life and health. This is particularly true for global household names such as Roche.
"As a Swiss company, it will be the biggest cost to the company if we lose our reputation. Though we have strong and high-quality products, there are actually 10 others that have at least the same things," he acknowledges.
"The fact that we are number one in the world as a healthcare company is not necessarily because of innovation and high standards. It's a lot about reputation. There's no compromise when it comes to doing everything with business ethics."
Business cultures are different in each country he covers, he observes. But in every single one, it's essential to apply ethical principles to ensure the long-term presence of Roche there.
His team adheres to the strictest ethical compliance based on Switzerland's high standards. But if a certain country has an even stricter compliance standard, his team will apply the local standard.
"Do we lose a lot of business by doing that? Yes. Is it worth keeping it like that? Yes," Mr Irimescu asserts. "We may lose in the short term, we may not win a tender. Maybe we are not a preferred supplier for a few years. But we keep our head high."
Without naming names, he says there was one country where Roche engaged in very little activity for years, because an environment of widespread corruption prevented it from operating the business ethically. After the country's public administration improved, the company decided it was the right time to step up activity again.
"For me, it's better just to keep the relationship [with countries unsuitable for doing business] like that. It's not necessary to be super-successful in such a place until things are cleaned up."
EVERYDAY ACHIEVEMENT
In the last two years, the RDC team under Mr Irimescu has doubled sales and products launched in the Thai market and other emerging markets. Mr Irimescu looks at his achievement in a modest way.
"When I come to work every day, I hear stories about a new hospital that has decided to buy our products. It means that more patients are being diagnosed or they are testing their blood glucose, and it's going to help them," he points out. "Every day is like an achievement in that sense."
His current goal is to develop the capacity of his team and make them realise the value of their participation in the pharmaceutical field.
Each year, the RDC team holds meetings for the staff to meet stakeholders, including patients and physicians. Patients usually come to the meeting to offer insights into what it's like to live with diabetes, and what it would mean for them to return to having more normal lives.
Doctors joining the meeting point out the challenges in treating diabetes patients, and give feedback on Roche products and services.
"For my team to understand the challenge makes a huge difference," he says. "They would feel like they want to make patients' lives easier.
"I've realised that pharma is an area where I could make a difference. I could see that I am not only selling products, like in my previous job. But every day, I go to work and know that someone, somewhere in the world, is using our products and surviving. Some of them have a better quality of life, and it gives me energy."
Mr Irimescu has also set a target to promote his staff in Thailand to a global level. The idea came to him when he learned that there were no Thais at the Roche global office in Basel. One reason, he surmises, is that Thai people may feel shy about showcasing their skills and talents.
"I never met Thais there. How come there are none there despite 70 million people living in Thailand? My ambition is to push my team, develop them, and make them confident enough to get to work there."