Tepsivo is a fully digital company. This does not seem like an exciting statement in 2025, but surprisingly, it still has a quite big meaning in the world of pharmacovigilance.

It has been five years since Tepsivo launched during the summer of 2020. One of our first blog posts was about what being a “digital company” meant to us – an unsurprising topic as the goal of modernizing old-school processes of pharmacovigilance is one of the core ideas of the company and during that time, the world was going through a rapid digitalization phase.

Back then, it had been a few months since the COVID-19 started to impact the lives in Europe with lockdowns and other restrictions. As a newcomer to the pharmacovigilance space, Tepsivo published a couple of blog posts around digitalization, remote work, how the world started adopting new ways to operate, and the “new normal.” 

Now the COVID times feel like a distant memory, so it is interesting to take a look back at those early blog posts and see how things have changed in the past five years.

Tepsivo’s Start in 2020

Tepsivo was established in 2020 under strict lockdown rules and we had no other option but to embrace the remote and digital ways of working right from the moment of the company’s conception. It took us three co-founders a whole year for all to meet in person for the first time since starting the company.

The first blog post from the COVID Era was about being a digital company and it includes some bold statements such as “We have no intention of going back to the old-school work practices even as that becomes possible in the hopefully not so distant future.” For Tepsivo that has held true, but many other companies have gone back to the old methods in one or more ways.

The second blog post on this topic from 2020 seems very relevant in 2025 as it discusses the pros and cons of remote working, old-school office working and hybrid working (although the term hybrid working was not as well-known back then, at least the author seems not to have known about it).

The remote working rules are relevant today, because after the COVID restrictions ended around 2023 a lot of companies have had back-to-office policies, there’s different kinds of rules about going to the office 3 days a week, no remote working on both Friday and Monday etc. Asking a person whether they work from home or office has become a standard part of the discussion when it comes to positions that used to be called “office work”.

Back in the early phase of Tepsivo’s journey the ability to work remotely on our own time, schedule only important meetings and be less distracted was shown to be incredibly productive.

In a short period of time Tepsivo had managed to set the company up, build quality management system, and develop a unique pharmacovigilance services delivery platform, all remotely without face-to-face meetings or workshops. This was something that has come up in several conversations with people since those early days; the lockdown was a great time to start a company like ours. For many other businesses, it was a killing blow.

Remote

We still continue to mainly operate and meet remotely, using different team collaboration tools and with people working in different countries across the globe. For many of us, working from home is the preferred way for various reasons. 

Tepsivo now has two physical hubs, one in Finland and one in the Czech Republic where we have offices that some people frequently work at. Since our first in-person meeting we have tried to get together approximately once a quarter to build stronger relationships among colleagues within Tepsivo, but also with our customers and partners. 

Now the number of employees has increased so significantly that organizing face-to-face meetings with everyone in one location for two or more days is becoming more and more difficult. But we’re still making the effort because we feel that it is important to connect on a more personal level. Most recently our team got together in Spain and we are planning a birthday party to celebrate the 5 years of our company’s existence.

While we are no longer forced to work remotely due to external reasons, and it is possible to go to offices and meet each other in person regularly, the flexibility around location still has the benefits of increasing productivity, improving employee happiness, and even doing our small bit to fight climate change.

We have managed to continue avoiding the use of paper in our processes and documentation and we use only smart digital tools like e-signatures. It still comes as a surprise to us when an auditor or other new pair of eyes on our quality management system praises our paperless processes. 

It is something that seems so obvious to us and calling e-signatures a “smart digital tool” in 2025 may seem a bit of an overstatement, however that is what we called it in our earlier blog post, which shows how digitalization has progressed in the past five years.

Another aspect to remote working and meetings that was highlighted in the 2020 blog post was substantially limiting our air travel. Dominik eloquently worded the thought: “There is an opportunity to espouse more sensible and socially responsible action on climate change. But that’s of course a large topic in and of itself.”

Internationally operating pharmaceutical companies usually split the countries into clusters, to make things more regional but still almost everyone attends international teleconferences daily or weekly. Flying to visit team members or to attend a conference abroad is a weekly or monthly activity for many. 

We still try to avoid unnecessary air travel, but admittedly, our company’s number of flight kilometers seems to grow every year.

In the 2020 blog post, I was pointing out that this might be just a thing in the pharmaceutical industry and that in other industries webcams were being used more frequently. 

Back then, I boldly stated that while the pharmaceutical industry is used to remote working and international collaboration, our industry is still a couple decades behind other businesses when it comes to the tools that we use. Unfortunately, I feel the same way in 2025.

I would again want to highlight that the most concerning part of this is that the technical inferiority gets worse the closer we get to the patient. In the R&D phase, the pharmaceutical industry uses and develops cutting edge technology, but when we are in direct contact with patients, we are suddenly unable to use iPads to replace paper forms.

In my second blog post on digitalization, I used Finland as an example for the difficulty of implementing existing digital tools to patient-level use.

Finland boasts to be the best, or at least a global leader, when it comes to electronic health records, but still in 2025, five years after the start of a global pandemic, we are struggling to track electronically all the treatment and medication received by all the citizens and to share all that information across the different healthcare organizations in the country, not to even mention cross-border data exchange within the EU.

But at least now the vaccination information tracking has improved significantly in Finland and it is available in the patients’ health records instead of in the cardboard books, which were still the standard in 2020.

If this is the situation in a secluded nation of 5 million people who claim to be the best at this stuff, one can only guess how the implementation and harmonization of electronic health records is going in countries that are geographically more extensive and possibly have a more decentralized governance.

Number of Employees

First of the two digitalization blog posts mentioned that the main Tepsivo promise was to be the most effective pharmacovigilance service provider. That also meant that the idea was that we would not need to employ and house many full-time employees, but instead we would allow flexibility regarding location but more importantly to aim to be as efficient as possible. The main message and reasoning has not changed in five years.

We prefer to improve our processes and products instead of solving challenges by hiring new professionals. Our goal is still to limit or remove any administrative task, if possible, and to develop software to automate processes instead of doing things the easy way and to hire more people when more work comes in. 

For us, it means that we can continue to maintain a small team even as we run global PV systems for clients, having taken over from other providers who needed more than 20 FTEs where we need just 2 or 3 people.

That being said, in the past five years the number of people at Tepsivo has grown from 2 full time individuals to about 25. With an increasing number of employees in the organization, it is easy to lose the personal connection with colleagues, and not to be aware of what all the other people in the team are doing. This sense of disconnect is at the heart of many of the digital tools and in the practices of setting up, often unnecessary, meetings that lack a clear goal and purpose.

Being Modern

For Tepsivo, in 2020, being modern meant using digital tools in pharmacovigilance, being a fully digital service provider. 

The use of the term “modern” has perhaps become outdated during the past few years as it is hard to measure and compare against other companies.

Being fully digital might still be unique in the world of pharmacovigilance, but many of the digital tools of 2020 have become a commonplace in the pharmacovigilance industry in the past few years. COVID-19 definitely had a role in this.

Instead of modern, the emphasis is now definitely on efficiency and uniqueness with the world’s only completely integrated digital PV system.

Home Office or Office at Home?

The second blog post from 2020 purely concentrated on remote working and how COVID-19 had made it a mainstream thing. It also contained my own experiences and opinions about remote work. Now in 2025, it was even a bit surprising to see that most of the text still remains relevant today. 

The 2020 blog post started off by stating that home is neither an office, nor a workplace.

Bold statement, especially today, but the statement was softened with a clarification that people can build an office in their homes, if they have the space.

I still agree with the core idea, but I also feel like the situation has changed quite a bit since 2020. Remote work and working from home has become much more common and even without the restrictions from a global pandemic, most choose to work from home at least from time to time, many most of the time. 

In 2020, I stated that “All you really need is a table, chair, electricity, and a reliable internet connection.” 

Now, I would add something along the lines of “calm environment” or “privacy” to this list, but otherwise the idea remains true. If you are an information worker, your office can be pretty much anywhere as long as you can concentrate on your work and not suffer, physically or mentally, while performing the tasks.

Meetings

What wasn’t clear in 2020 to me, as Tepsivo at the time was in practice a two-man operation without active customer contracts, was the fact that an early phase start-up has a bit different kind of requirements related to meetings and calls than most companies that have dozens of customers, several team members and many other stakeholders.

I was perhaps reaching for the asynchronous company ideal, that reduces the need for meetings to a minimum. Tepsivo is currently not an asynchronous company, and probably never will be fully asynchronous, unless we decide at some point that it is something we want and really work on it. But I still believe that reducing the time spent on meetings and having as efficient meetings as possible, will increase productivity and there are tools available, including ours, that make it easier to reduce regular check-up meetings because it is easy to get an overview of what other people are doing.

When thinking about pharmacovigilance as a set of data related processes, the thought of working through a platform like ours, or using another platform like Jira, asynchronous working does seem ideal to me. When thinking of the basic requirements; data coming in, being collected, processed, analyzed and reported, there are not really parts of the pharmacovigilance processes that yell “2-hour-workshop” or “safety council meeting to discuss signals”. This works at Tepsivo, but we see that it is still an outlier in the industry.

Working Location

Tepsivo was set up while the three co-founders were living in different countries and for the first couple of years, we were fully remote.

The earlier blog post about remote working had a section about the COVID movement of people working from cottages and rural areas. In Finland, that meant people were working from their summer cottages or in some cases bought inexpensive homes outside of Helsinki. During those couple of years, people started at positions in remote locations, and moved out of the big cities.

Now, globally, and especially in the US, the back to office, or return to office, movement has forced people who were hired as remote workers to relocate or even resign in some cases. 

Today, and even way before 2020, people working in the pharmaceutical industry are used to working with colleagues from several different countries and backgrounds. It does not really matter where exactly the person sits, as most of your colleagues are in different parts of the world. Working from different countries is something that we will continue to do and thanks to the local contact people that we have globally, it seems only natural. 

However, it is noticeable that when we are truly working around the world, the time difference between East Asia and the Americas makes things difficult. We mainly work from Europe, and it is not nice to have a call with someone from New Zealand and New Jersey, forcing the other to interrupt their dinner and the second to wake up at 5 am. Of course, if you’re the one located in Europe, you are quite flexible to have remote meetings with anyone around the world during normal business hours.

Here the asynchronous working using platform tools is very useful. The PV Specialist in New Zealand  submits a safety report during their business hours, their Account Manager colleague in Europe comes in a couple hours later and reviews the entered data and the customer in New Jersey sees the completed case report ready for submission.

Back to Office

The first Tepsivo blog post about remote working described my experiences, highlighting the discrepancy in policies across different locations of the same company. While some countries offices of one company allowed flexible remote work and working hours, other countries had strict rules requiring office attendance and even tracked arrival times to the office, making sure that nobody was late from work.

In 2020, I noted that these varying policies might stem from factors like generation gaps and industry-specific practices. Despite advocating for some level of remote work, I also acknowledged the importance of in-person interaction and productivity within an office environment.

In the past two years, several major companies around the world have made headlines with their five-day office mandates, signaling potential changes ahead. The trend seems to continue in 2025. 

In the US, the number of companies with structured hybrid models, where employees follow set office schedules, more than doubled from early 2023 to late 2024. During the same time period the portion of organizations with fully flexible arrangements decreased. 

The number of average days required at the office was almost three in the US companies at Q4 2024, with most companies setting a minimum number of weekly office hours. Both fully remote and full-time office policies have been losing favor.

Recently, I heard a statement that hybrid working is the way to go, but nobody knows yet how to do hybrid working properly. Even in 2020, the polls stated that people wanted to work more from home and after tasting the sweet taste of freedom, some of the employers are gambling with their return-to-office policies.

Remote Working as a Benefit

When it comes to flexibility around work location, the US statistics show stark contrast between smaller and bigger companies. 

While many business giants demand five-day office weeks, smaller companies continue to give their employees remote options. It is easy to see why: Working from home is an employee benefit that is in most cases almost free to the employer, or might even save their money (less coffee being consumed at the office).

Smaller companies, with 500 employees or less (sizewise Tepsivo belongs to this category), also have a better chance of hiring because the applicants see this as a benefit and it is easier to hire across regions. In other words, workplace flexibility can be a powerful recruitment tool. Or at least not having flexibility in the working location and schedule, can be a dealbreaker.

Working from home reduces commuting expenses, can have a positive impact on mental health and for parents flexible office policies can prevent unnecessary stress. It is not just the younger employees and parents who appreciate working from home. 

In my 2020 blog post, I suggested that generational gaps might have been the reason why in my previous company some offices had stricter in-office policies. Now that those older generations have gotten a taste of the benefits of home office, they are as reluctant to give it up as their younger counterparts.

It is easy to quantify the upsides of flexible work location policies, but it can be hard to quantify the downsides.

The Tepsivo Way

As mentioned, Tepsivo was founded by people living in different countries during the COVID-19 lockdown. On paper, our timing or the working environment(s) could not be considered ideal. 

The external conditions had almost no impact on the ideology of the company. It was our goal from the beginning to approach the pharmaceutical industry from an experienced point of view, but still disrupting and significantly improving the ways of working of the industry.

I can confidently say that our approach to remote work vs. in-office and videoconferencing vs. in-person working has remained the same and it works. I could have kept the text from 2020 about Tepsivo’s way of doing things exactly the same and I believe it would still make sense to me and my colleagues.

Since the beginning, Tepsivo’s official address has been a virtual office which gives us the chance to receive mail and have reception services but does not require us to pay rent for a space that we do not need. 

The use of services such as Spaces and Spacent gives us the flexibility to rent a working space or meeting room for an hour if we want to have a face-to-face meeting somewhere or for a month, as has been the case for the past 3 years. And the best part is that this works around the world, at a minute’s notice, if really needed.

Operating without a permanent physical location frees us from several burdens, like rent and cleaning, but gives us a lot of flexibility to work closely with our clients or to collaborate within the company. 

In the 2020, blog post I pointed out the difficult situation COVID-19 had caused as most of the offices, coworking spaces, and libraries were closed and left us with few choices. Back then I was using the central library of Helsinki as a working location. Tepsivo has since used that same library for booking meeting rooms when organizing our quarterly meetings, meeting with industry colleagues, and to organize entertainment in the video game rooms. By coincidence, our current office in Helsinki is in Terkko Health Hub, which is located in the building of another library.

Even though there are great ways of working remotely, it will be hard to surpass the experience of meeting someone in person, working out a solution together and grabbing a cold beverage afterwards to celebrate it.