Skip to main content

Elation’s New Hire Training Includes a Day in Your Shoes

Elation’s New Hire Training Includes a Day in Your Shoes Elation’s New Hire Training Includes a Day in Your Shoes January 30, 2015

Perspective is a large part of our clinical first philosophy.

We rely on perspective to guide our product development process. It helps us navigate critical decisions to ensure that we build clinical tools that support all of our users in their effort to deliver excellent care for their patients.

We respect the weight of the responsibilities healthcare providers and their staff endure every day. Without the proper context, technology can miss the mark by over-simplifying the importance of a single action. Or worse, over-complicate a process by introducing unnecessary actions.

Internalizing the user’s perspective is a vital part of our company culture at Elation.

We require every member of our team to spend a day with a practice. Our new hires shadow the provider and staff from the moment doors open until the last chart is complete. This sun-up to sundown experience is crucial to understanding the real world our product touches. It frames the context of our clinical first philosophy because Elation employees can connect with our users at a very concrete level.

Health IT tools cover a broad spectrum of technology and systems that are often developed layers above, and seemingly galaxies away, from the very people the tools are supposed to help.

Every employee is also required to write about the experience because reflection is also an important part of the new-hire process.

For example, one of our newest hires wrote, “It was amazing to watch the front office staff work. The phone rang and it was a patient asking to be ‘squeezed-in’ to see the doctor. While she was on the phone with the patient, a second one walked in to be checked in, just as a third patient called in as a last minute cancellation. Meanwhile, the second patient had brought in written notes that tracked her blood pressure for two weeks but only had one copy. In the middle of everything, the doctor arrived asking the front office staff to contact the on-call neurologist at another hospital asap. It’s absolutely clear, our tools must be intuitive and operate seamlessly for our users.”

We don’t want to just put our best foot forward.

We want to put the best tools in our users’ hands. We were fortunate to grow up in our father’s practice and work in his clinic. That perspective informed the way we built Elation and we stand by it still.