“I wake up in the morning unsure of whether I want to savor the world or save the world. This makes it hard to plan the day, [unless you work for Arcadia].”
– Steve Gershman, with apologies to E.B. White
Arcadia Analytics is used by a diverse range of clients across the country – from multi-billion dollar health plans to small, rural primary care practices. A dedicated Product Support team of technical data analysts is focused on making sure that each organization can get the most out of its data. Steve Gershman manages that team, and we asked him to share some of his experiences with potential future Arcadians. You can read about other awesome Arcadians here. If their stories inspire you, please check out our careers page.
When did you join Arcadia, and what do you do here?
I joined Arcadia in 2011 and currently run the Product Support Team, which manages all defects and deployments for the Arcadia Analytics product. Over the past five years I learned from some wonderfully talented managers and engineers, and with their mentorship held a variety of roles from Implementation Specialist to Technical Lead.
I started at Arcadia as a business analyst but shifted into a more technical role to build a full-stack product skillset. I started with ETL (extract transform load) development to source medical records from our clients, transitioned to data aggregation and analytics, and fulfilled my goal by visualizing that information through our in-house reporting platform. After absorbing the technical structure of Arcadia Analytics and building some new features, I oversaw new implementations and supported them as they matured.
What are some of the best client successes you’ve enabled?
One day I accompanied one of our clinical consultants to a community health center and presented a local doctor with her key performance metrics from the past year. When we reviewed her results, she nodded intermittently until we reached the results for Fall Risk Screening and she told us the numbers didn’t reflect her good work. In 30 seconds the clinician and I traced the difference between the on-screen numbers and the doctor’s actual quality of care to a few misplaced clicks during each appointment. With a clear picture of how her keystrokes transformed into the metrics on our report, spanning technical and clinical knowledge, we could give the doctor credit for her great work while making it simpler to deliver quality care in the future.
Through many of those visits, Arcadia raised the entire organization’s ACO (Accountable Care Organization) measures by 20% on aggregate. From that initiative to redefining readmissions logic or transmitting immunizations to state governments, the projects at Arcadia make a real difference for our clients’ abilities to manage their patients’ health and costs. I have built technical solutions for some of the largest and most forward-thinking healthcare systems in the country, and had the opportunity to architect technical solutions which govern the entire workflow from a doctor entering data into an electronic medical record system to a care manager reviewing the aggregated risk scores and condition history to make informed decisions.
What’s kept you at Arcadia?
I wake up in the morning unsure of whether I want to savor the world or save the world. This makes it hard to plan the day, [unless you work for Arcadia]. While E.B. White first expressed most of that sentiment, I genuinely enjoy working at a place which aligns with my personal desire to wake up each morning and utilize my technology skillset for the betterment of the people around me.
With that said, the people make Arcadia unique. While the ping-pong table and free snacks are nice perks, the smart, purposeful people who engage me each day and keep me learning and producing quality work are the true benefit. Everyone wants to grow as individuals while making a positive impact on the healthcare system. Arcadia has deep clinical and technical skillsets with access to aggregated clinical data from more than 20 million patient lives; that’s a rare combination and therefore a great place to learn.
What awesome thing has your team done recently?
We have invested a lot of time in cross-training; we think that having any member of the team be able to jump into another role to help out as needed will enable us to serve our clients more quickly and more effectively. After a lot of training, I decided it was time for us to put ourselves to the test.
On April Fool’s Day, I put every team members’ business cards into a hat. Each of us blindly selected a card representing the teammate whose role he or she would have to fulfill for the day. Everyone on the team had worked hard to master our product’s technical functionality – we know it better than anyone outside of the engineers who built it. During that day I administered all backend deployments and someone else managed the team. Spontaneously everyone started calling each other by the names of the people whose roles they held, and we had a lot of fun trading places. It quickly became apparent that our time spent cross-training really paid off. Seeing everyone so comfortable managing key team roles demonstrated the value of each team member and our combined cross-training, which is rewarding to me as a manager.
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