Let’s talk about quality.

Quality is viscerally known through the emotions we feel, visually prescribed by the elements our eyes lay on, and through the delight that our environments, including our tools, give us.

We instantly know what that feels like, and it starts with the first look.

The first look

Psychologically, the weight of a first impression is immeasurable.

Konrad Lorenz's classic experiment illustrates this. Newly hatched ducklings, bind to the first moving thing. Usually, it’s the mother duck. But in this experiment, they followed Lorenz, and continued to follow him even though they eventually saw their mother.

The same phenomenon is true in human experience: the initial navigation of a product, the first glance of a physical space, the opening notes of a voice.

These moments carve a perception of quality immediately that is often hard to change.

Design is at the root of these encounters, and has the potential to establish the bar of quality within milliseconds. And these implications have cascading effects.

The quality void in healthcare

Healthcare deserves nothing less than the highest quality.

Yet when thinking of quality through the lens of design excellence, we think of companies like Linear, Ramp, Stripe. Enterprise healthcare, by contrast, remains largely absent from consideration.

It is unfortunate how the tools that carry the weight of the human condition; tools used for split-second, often life-changing decisions; are too often designed as an afterthought rather than as experiences worthy of the stakes they carry.

Clunky interfaces of medical records. Poorly designed systems for charting. Confusing health system workflows to coordinate care. Spend a few hours in any healthcare environment and you’ll be able to point this quality void out.

Our founding team lived in Tennessee, two minutes across our first hospital, for eight months and saw all of this firsthand.

And when we started building Vitalize, it started with design. Our first enterprise deal was made without a single line of code written. Just a visual prototype.

Design as the voice of quality

Since then, we’ve always led with design as an instrument of quality. This manifests in three ways:

1. Every designer and engineer fly to customers at least once a month, and deeply embed themselves into our users’ workflows. They uniquely understand the challenges of our users and by extension, are thoughtful contributors to product vision given their perspective of user context.

2. Our product function is not an afterthought. While most enterprise healthcare companies are heavily sales-led, we thoughtfully balance strategic needs for execs (the buyers) with the real day-to-day challenges that the end-users face.

3. We experiment on a weekly basis. Feature-based experiments. Vendor and software experiments. Cultural and organizational practice experiments. We’re probably trying (and failing) exponentially faster than any other enterprise healthcare company, on this pursuit of quality.

Design is the voice of quality, and ultimately becomes deeply embedded in the Vitalize experience.

This means that design is at the start of every conversation, from how the product is shaped to how our new hires are being onboarded. There is a clear bar for quality that is created and set by every single member of our team. When we hire, we look to answer the question: “does this person raise the bar for the team?”

We don’t micromanage quality. It’s a standard we exude on day 1 that is felt viscerally on the team, in how we treat each other and our mission. It trickles down to how we take care of our customers, how we lead product, and how we continually chase better.

If you’re looking to raise the bar of quality in healthcare, consider joining our team.

— Brandon Yu