About the founder
Jay Jolliffe
Jay Jolliffe is the founder of Ascenda Health, a physician referral marketing firm for medical clinics and labs in Ontario. He has spent eighteen years in healthcare, all of it from the founder's seat, and co-owns and operates clinics of his own.
- Ascenda Health
- Founder, 2008 to present. Started in 2008 as QRS Monitoring with one cardiology client and one idea: market a physician's practice the way a pharmaceutical rep markets a drug. Became Ascenda Health in 2025. Clients across cardiology, cardiac diagnostics, GI endoscopy, radiology, fertility, lifestyle medicine and home care.
- Richmond Hill Walk-In Clinic
- Co-owner and operator since December 2025. Seven physicians, seven staff, open 72 hours a week. Runs operations end to end.
- Break Through Clinic
- Co-founder, 2025. Opioid agonist therapy clinics co-located with community pharmacies, two sites. Runs the business outside clinical care.
- Quality Rhythm Solutions
- Co-founder and co-owner, 2010 to 2024. Community Holter monitoring service at eleven family practice and hospital sites across the Greater Toronto Area.
- Cardiac Rehab Plus
- Founder, 2018 to 2020. Preventive outpatient cardiac rehabilitation, delivered as in-person group programming. Closed when COVID ended group programs.
- Pathways
- Co-founder and chief marketing officer, 2021 to 2025. Contract management software for networks, associations and healthcare. Shareholder and board member.
- Education
- BA (Honours) Philosophy, Carleton University, 2007. CCPE accreditation in pharmaceutical sales, 2007.
The work
The through-line is the referring physician. A clinic that lives on referrals needs to be the name a family doctor thinks of for a given problem, and the office their staff can refer to without friction. Jay has built that for clinics since 2008: the referrer database, the message, the fax and email rotation, the caller, the visits, and the monthly tracking by office. The tools have changed. The core has not.
His longest engagement, a cardiology group, ran seventeen years. In its first three years the group's revenue grew 22, 28 and 24 percent, and Jay negotiated three hospital diagnostic-testing partnerships for it that are still running more than a decade later.
Not all of it worked. Cardiac Rehab Plus, a preventive outpatient cardiac rehab program he ran in 2018 and 2019, was built on in-person group sessions and did not survive COVID. In hindsight the business model did not hold. The service itself was as good as anything he has been part of, and he still thinks about what it would look like today on a different model.
Since 2025 he has also sat on the other side of the table, running clinics of his own. The advice Ascenda gives is advice he has had to follow at his own front desk.
How it started
Philosophy degree, no plan. His father, visiting in Ottawa, suggested pharmaceutical sales. Summer 2007 was the wrong year to be a twenty-two-year-old cold-calling drug companies in a suit; the market was cutting reps, not hiring them. A cardiologist he met along the way asked a different question: what if you could market my practice the way a rep markets a drug? Print materials, a defined catchment, a schedule of offices to visit, conversations with doctors. That question became QRS Monitoring, then Ascenda Health.
Writing
Jay writes about the work on LinkedIn, mostly from live client engagements: what a referral report shows, what a front desk does with a fax, what changed when someone finally visited. The definitional piece on this site is What Is Physician Referral Marketing?
Outside the work: twenty-five years as a DJ, marathons, two kids, and a Sunday breakfast program he has helped run for more than two decades.
Talk to Jay
Thirty minutes, and a free read of your referral data
Bring your referral report if you have one. If the referral base is not the constraint on your growth, Jay will say so on the call.
Book a call