I founded Verto as a product-first company with the mission to find innovative ways to use and deploy digital technologies that make a meaningful impact in healthcare sustainability, patient outcomes, and patient/provider experiences (The Quadruple Aim). Part of the way that we ensure this spirit is built into our development DNA, is that we have an innovation arm (Blue Team) who is tasked with a disruption mandate: first to disrupt existing patterns for how digital health solves emerging healthcare challenges; and next to find ways to internally disrupt our existing platform and how it operates.
Every developer in Verto has the opportunity to participate in these Blue Team initiatives (we specifically set aside time for all established developers) and choose independently which disruptions are of interest to them personally. These initiatives are strictly off-sprint, interactive development spikes designed to address gap areas developers have found in day-to-day work or emerging health sector needs. As a developer, I know how often I found code that I knew wouldn't scale or a functionality that could save our users tons of time…. but I wasn't allocated time to solve it, eventually solidifying that issue as technical debt. I wanted to change this equation and see what would happen if we gave the keys to the developers instead.
The answer is magic. Code that is scalable, wild ideas that manifest into usable products in the span of weeks, and a reinvigoration of the developer spirit.
This blog is an open chronicle of our experiments, our ideas, our hacks, our curiosities, and our passions documented to share it with the world. It is a way for us to share the learnings, the challenges and even share some open source code with the internet community in a way that hopefully helps some people out there. It is a transparent window into the developer passion that drives Verto and a small way for us to contribute back to the developer world that has helped us all get to where we are today. Enjoy, and let us know what you think!