In this exclusive interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Tim Rice, CEO of The Rounds, shares his vision for enabling secure, peer-led collaboration among physicians and healthcare professionals across Canada. With a background in commercial leadership at Novartis and a deep commitment to privacy by design, Tim has guided The Rounds to become a trusted hub for verified medical communities—empowering clinicians to share knowledge, streamline communication, and advance patient care while meeting the rigorous demands of Canadian healthcare regulation.
Tim Rice is the CEO of The Rounds, a Halifax-based health tech company that builds secure, verified communities for physicians and other healthcare professionals. He joined The Rounds in 2016 and became CEO in 2018, guiding the company through product focus, growth, and a Series A led by BIP Ventures and Panoramic Ventures. Before The Rounds, Tim spent more than a decade in commercial roles at Novartis, working across sales leadership and market development. His work centers on privacy by design, compliant medical communications, and making peer knowledge easier to use in daily practice
How did The Rounds identify a gap in the Canadian health care market, and what inspired your team to launch a secure collaboration network exclusively for verified physicians and healthcare professionals?
We saw two gaps: trust and relevance. Canadian physicians were collaborating in email lists, generic social apps, and mixed international forums that were not built for Canadian privacy law or clinical nuance. Conversations were fragmented by province and specialty, and no one could be fully sure who was in the room. That slows decisions and adds risk.
The spark came from clinicians, who asked for a verified, Canadian, no-noise space where they could ask real questions, share experience, and find peers quickly. We built The Rounds to be that place. Every member is verified, every community is purpose-built, and privacy is not an afterthought. The goal is simple: make it easy for Canadian HCPs to learn from each other at the speed of practice, with fewer emails, fewer dead ends, and zero guesswork about identity. No bots, no spam.
Add to that a market shift. Clinic time is tighter, hybrid care is normal, and many practices restrict unscheduled visits, so the traditional field-rep model reaches fewer HCPs. Push tactics like inbox blasts create noise. The Rounds supports a pull model, where verified clinicians opt into clearly labeled partner spaces, find program details and contacts when needed, and keep discussion peer-led and transparent. It is a quieter, safer, more productive way to connect clinicians and partners when value is clear.
Can you explain the triple-verification process for physician members and how it ensures trust, privacy, and security in the network?
Our triple verification confirms professional status, identity, and affiliation before anyone can post, comment, or message.
- License check: We confirm a physician’s legal name and license number against the relevant provincial college registry and verify active status.
- Email verification with alias clean up: We confirm control of the email via a verification link and filter common aliases (for example plus addressing) so each account stays tied to an individual.
- Proprietary trust step: When needed, our team does a quick live check, for example a call to the clinic, along with a few safeguards to confirm identity and prevent duplicates.
Trust is reinforced by real-name profiles, role-based access, and visible verification badges. Privacy and security are built in, with encryption in transit and at rest, strict access controls, granular permissions, and audit logging. We run routine reviews, respond quickly to reports, and enforce community guidelines that prohibit patient identifiers. The outcome is a network where members know who they are speaking with, and where sensitive professional discussion can happen with confidence.
In what ways does The Rounds facilitate actionable learning, knowledge sharing, and networking among Canadian physicians, specifically supporting small and midsize medical practices?
We focus on practical, time saving collaboration powered by experts. Verified thought leaders, medical specialists, and key opinion leaders (KOLs) host channels, lead case reviews, and run short AMAs. Physicians post de-identified case questions and get answers from experts who know the Canadian context, with peer input alongside. Expert replies are highlighted and easy to follow, so a busy clinician can scan to the best guidance first.
Physicians and allied HCPs get fast access to subspecialty insight without waitlists or cold calls. A rural GP can drop a question in and see an expert perspective without traveling miles to a conference. Partnered webinars and Q&A sessions are recorded and organized for on demand viewing, so learning fits around clinic schedules. Search ties it together, turning solved problems and expert commentary into a living, Canadian knowledge base. Guardrails keep it safe and useful, no patient identifiers, real names, and transparent roles.
The Rounds has partnered with national associations and the life sciences industry. How do these partnerships benefit its physician members and help advance medical communication in Canada’s healthcare sector?
Partnerships raise the signal and lower the noise. With associations, physicians get timely guidance, event access, and community forums that are province-aware and specialty-specific. Content sits beside real peer discussion, which helps translate recommendations into clinic-ready practice. For example, partner-led sessions bring subject-matter experts into verified rooms where questions are candid and context is Canadian.
With life sciences, we offer clearly labeled, opt-in spaces that focus on education and patient support resources. Physicians can find program details, updates, and contacts in one trusted place. Guardrails matter: member identities are protected, reporting is aggregated, and disclosures are transparent. This model replaces inbox blasts with accountable, searchable communication. The result is better alignment between clinicians, associations, and industry, and a more reliable way to move important information to the point of care.
What advice do you have for small and medium-sized businesses aspiring to foster community-driven innovation and digital transformation—especially in regulated industries like healthcare?
1) Trust by design. In regulated spaces, trust is the product. Verify who is in the room, use role based access, keep clean audit trails, and make privacy the default. Write simple rules of the road, enforce them, and treat compliance as a feature users can feel. When people trust the space, they participate, and participation is the engine of innovation.
2) Turn those outcomes into trusted signals for partners. Share privacy safe, aggregated metrics that map to real value, for example expert content consumed, questions answered, and resources accessed at the point of need. Keep engagement opt in, label sponsorships clearly, and respect roles. When partners see consistent, high quality interactions that help clinicians do their jobs, they return, because repeat investment becomes common sense.
