Empiric is driven by a passion to improve healthcare and health. Our team members join the company to make a difference through client partnerships, and more importantly their patients.  Our team members rally around our mission.  This isn’t just a job for us.  Our team is passionate about moving the needle in healthcare and they’ve come to Empiric Health to do just that.

At the core of our work is our ability to influence positive outcomes and affordability with evidence and clinician to clinician dialogue, leading to better healthcare delivery.   We want patients to get healthy, have great outcomes, and get the most value for their healthcare – we know this is possible and our team members are all in.

As our clients’ clinical teams take care of patients, we take care of them by providing transparent information and evidence as they make influential decisions every day. We do this with our innovative, clinically focused analytics and our own experienced clinical team.  Our consulting teams leverage our analytics to address variation and show our clients real-world, relevant evidence to help their patients achieve better outcomes with high quality, high value resources.

Our secret sauce is our unyielding commitment to our mission combined with our team member community.  Whether working on our technology, directly with our clients, or supporting our community, our Empiric Health team members and the culture we create make the difference.  We focus on hiring the best talent and we value our connected community, quality, adaptability, innovation and transparency.  Our belief is that a great workplace is an engaged community where you learn the most, are challenged daily to perform your best work, and have the most fun.  We are bullish about our future and the impact we will make.

This document is a statement of who we are and what we stand for.  Drafted by our current team members for our future team members.  We are proud of our culture – but it is always evolving. Every person who joins Empiric will help to influence it in a way that aligns with what is outlined below.  At Empiric, we have a commitment to:

1. Connected Community
2. High Standards for Things That Matter
3. Adaptability
4. Value Based Innovation
5. Transparency

Connected Community.

Our community is highly talented, self-directed, and team-oriented. We value positive relationships – across our team and with our clients.   Everyone’s voice can be heard and across all of our teams, we are consistently open to new ideas.  We value people over process so there are not many policies or procedures here. We trust our leaders and peers to make decisions to balance the good of the company, our clients, and our team members.  We don’t have a lot of “rules” because we hire great people and trust them to make good decisions.  We foster a culture of ownership where people feel connected to the organization and each other and therefore feel trusted and empowered as an individual to make good decisions on behalf of the company. This generates a sense of responsibility that drives us to do great work that benefits the company, our clients, and ultimately their patients. In healthcare, of course, there are a few important exceptions to our anti-rules philosophy. We are strict about ethical issues and healthcare compliance.  No exceptions!

We value diversity of thought, and recognize that a team with a broad range of individual experiences and skills better fosters that environment.  We hire awesome people from a broad spectrum of backgrounds into our community, knowing that our team will bring their diverse worldview to problem solving and ultimately create better solutions for our clients.  So, whether our professional background is as a clinician, a consultant, a teacher, a data scientist, an accountant or any other profession, if we have the skill set for the role and a passion for improving healthcare, there can be a place for us at Empiric and we are excited to welcome new team members into our community.  Come stand with us!

We work in a very fast paced environment that can be stressful and most of the time is ambiguous.  It is assumed, and even encouraged, that our team members will be passionate about their beliefs, views, and business decisions.  Each of us need to create a point of view that drives execution of work and be comfortable changing as we learn as a team. It is expected that we will disagree and dissent sometimes.  Discussion, respectful argument, and ultimately agreement are part of our growth and solutions.  That said, we always treat our colleagues in a respectful manner.  When we disagree, we seek to understand before reacting. We seek external input from different resources when making decisions that affect others and intentionally seek out new and differing opinions to ensure we are reaching the best outcome.

The success of an individual team member is a success for the company and we want each and every one of our team members to succeed here. Team members shift roles based on their interests and abilities.  We strive to continue to make sure that each of our team members have the right opportunities to grow and contribute.  As we have interest in areas outside of our specific roles, we speak up!  We all wear lots of hats and encourage involvement in multiple areas.

Despite working in different geographic locations, we regularly communicate with our team members. We use Zoom videoconferencing for almost all internal communications to help build personal connections and camaraderie.  We use various Slack channels to build relationships and have fun (the #meme channel is a team favorite) and we are committed to fostering environments for our team members to connect and get to know one another outside of work.  We host two team wide meetings each year, where we all come together for a few days of training and team building – they are a highlight for our community!

High Standards for Things That Matter.

As a company and community, we hold ourselves to high standards in every aspect of our work. We view every interaction, internally and externally, as an opportunity to exceed expectations. As we work to define and implement innovative, high impact solutions, we recognize we will encounter challenges and we choose to view every challenge as an opportunity to grow. We have high expectations of ourselves and our colleagues, creating an environment where achievers thrive.

Working in a fast-paced environment, we are effective at balancing our priorities.  We are critical thinkers and are thoughtful around what priorities will best move our projects, clients, and contributions forward.  We seek to understand the market and our clients’ needs, which helps us drive and prioritize our best outcome(s).

Our relationships with each other and our clients are just as important as the results that we drive.  We strive to be authentic in all situations, admitting where we’re still finding the best way to do things.  We recognize that we won’t always get it right the first time and we are open to failure and feedback, while always respecting and striving toward high quality execution.

We work hard to create a professional environment where our team feels rewarded on merit and contributions.  Our team members’ contributions to the company, our clients, and themselves are the primary factor in determining compensation adjustments which are reviewed on a regular basis.

Adaptability.

As a rapid growth company, we recognize the need for our team members to be flexible and adaptable.  While our mission and our accountability to our clients is clear, we are often challenged to solve problems and answer questions that we haven’t seen before.  We are the cartographers drawing our roadmaps.  Our highly skilled team explores territory beyond their original job description, and if they find they love the new waters, we work closely with them to continue to provide opportunities in that space.

We are constantly evolving as an organization and expect our team members to be evolving along with us.  As a team, we are able to handle the ambiguity of a start-up environment with curiosity, adaptability, and a passion to learn and grow from our individual and collective experiences.

Our team members spend time working together in creative office spaces, onsite with our hospital and health system clients, and remotely from their home cities.  They need to adapt to various audiences, utilize a wide array of communication tools, and develop trust between each other across multiple time zones.  Every day is different than the one before it, and many times not what was planned.  Our team members thrive in and seek out an environment of constant change, always striving to reflect and improve.

Value Based Innovation.

As consumers of healthcare services; we believe that it’s incumbent upon us as healthcare providers and supporters to be true stewards of our resources not just for the hospital and provider but also for the patient.  We, as patients, pay more for healthcare than ever before and need to trust that our providers are acting as our advocates not only in ensuring quality services and outcomes but care that is affordable. We believe there is a better way.  Through our passion, our creativity, our adaptability and our ingenuity, we are innovators. We use our ingenuity and empathy to create inventive solutions that provide value, efficiency, and affordable healthcare to patients, as well as reducing unnecessary costs to hospitals, without sacrificing quality of care.

But it’s not just innovation for innovation sake.  Innovation without a strategic foundation only serves to make an already complex environment more challenging.   We are strategic in our innovation – driven by our outcome orientation as a community.  We are constantly reviewing what is available on the innovation front and assessing what will take us further down the line toward achieving our objectives and advancing our clients’ mission.  We are open to new ideas and work collaboratively to create new approaches and discover practical solutions to hard problems for our clients.  We are full of passion and creativity and our investment in our tools, our team members, and our clients allow us to be on the cutting edge of improving healthcare, starting with surgical services.

Transparency. 

As an organization with a mission in healthcare, we engage in deliberate and transparent feedback.  This transparency and feedback is essential for the well-being and success of our clients, their physicians, and the patients they serve.  Both successes and areas for improvement are communicated with integrity to each other. This means we are respectful, vulnerable, and accountable for our actions. We build trust among our team members by providing feedback to each other even when it is uncomfortable to do so.

We believe our team members will learn faster and grow more if we make feedback a regular part of how we communicate and work with one another. We actively encourage and accept feedback as part of our culture, whether it is a quick touch point immediately following a meeting, part of a weekly update, a team wide shout out on our #praise Slack channel, or a monthly conversation with your coach.  We know that real time feedback is the most helpful feedback and we have systems in place through Gmail, Lattice, and Slack to make this as easy as possible for our team members to give and receive.  The act of soliciting and giving feedback is valued and rewarded and is modeled at all levels of the organization.

All team members’ experiences, regardless of title, are equally valued.  We respectfully challenge the status quo for progress of our work and personal growth.  Our leaders model transparency and are always open to feedback and honest criticism. Team members frequently ask each other, “What could I be doing better?  What did I miss the chance to do?” and themselves, “What feedback have I not yet shared?”.

As a community, we are extremely transparent on what is working and what isn’t.  Within their lanes of focus, our technical teams are structured in self organizing teams, which means each team member is accountable for the results, both good and bad.  They are accountable to each other and own their results as a group.  Our service teams work closely together day in and day out to ensure each of our projects are moving forward and to address challenges collectively.  We have weekly all hands meetings so that we know what is happening across the company – client updates, sales activity, and education topics are shared.   We impact each other by intentionally listening and showing empathy while working together to deliver exceptional results for our clients.

We do the right thing for our company, our clients, their patients, and each other. As a transparent organization, we own our failures, celebrate our successes, operate from a genuine posture and take responsibility for ourselves and the company as if it were our own.  We combine thoughtfulness with humility in our interactions with each other and our clients.  At Empiric, Humility > Ego.

Our work and our analytics provide transparency into the value of healthcare.  Our team members are passionate about making a difference and our clients see the results and feel the impact of our work in a quality driven, measurable way.  We are, after all, Empiric!

IN SUMMARY

As we continue to grow, we will continue to create our culture together. In fact, every one of our team members at publication of this document has contributed to its content and has an ongoing voice in this proclamation.

As we stated above, we are proud of our culture – but it is always evolving. Every person who joins Empiric will help to shape who we are and what we stand for. We intend to learn faster, go further, and deliver more for our clients and their patients.  We can do this because we have passionate team members with diverse perspectives constantly trying to find better ways to work together more effectively.

We are on a powerful mission.

We have a connected community.

We have high standards for the things that matter.

We are adaptable.

We prioritize value based innovation.

We are transparent with each other, our clients, and ourselves.

We are passionate about improving healthcare and health.

This is who we are and what we stand for.