Software Development
Career Trajectory Month 2019

How Greenphire is setting its team up for professional growth by letting them take the wheel

The clinical trial payment solutions company is putting an emphasis on helping employees plan their career path.

Couches in Greenphire's King of Prussia office. (Courtesy photo)
With countless possibilities for improving healthcare, technology continues to make a powerful impact on the welfare of patients — including facets of it that you may not have realized needed improvement.

Take clinical trials. With a myriad of barriers slowing down the clinical trial process — patient transportation, privacy laws, payment — Greenphire, a clinical trial payment solutions company, came up with a solution to automating the payment process so that companies running the trials could focus on the science, not the patient logistics surrounding it.

“Before I came on board, I didn’t know a company like this existed. I didn’t know it had solved such a big problem in such a simple way,” said Director of IT & Clincard Development, Rishi Yadav. “In every small release we do, we can make such a big improvement on the lives of people struggling with their health. I have such an appreciation for the way Greenphire solved this.”

Employees have also expressed their appreciation for how Greenphire has enabled them to navigate their career paths and evolve as professionals.

“I came in at the bottom of the food chain,” said Megan Martinez, a lead application developer. “I’d applied to be a dev, but I was fairly junior. My main experience was in bioinformatics. Through mentorship and collaboration across departments at Greenphire, I became a senior developer within two years and then a lead last year.”

Helene McElroy, now a senior manager, had a similar experience with growth, but in the form of adopting a wider breadth of skills.

“When I started as a front-end dev, the IT team was only 12 people. The CTO helped you fix your computer,” said McElroy. “Early on, we didn’t have a UX person or anyone to support marketing. I had some background in UX design and marketing, and I saw they had a need, so I offered to step in and implement website design updates. I also spent about 20% of my time assisting with marketing.

The impact for me was getting to work on multiple parts of the company. I was able to gain so much more exposure to our environment and our product than if I had only acted as a front-end dev. That exposure allowed me to build a more thoughtful process around our features.

However their growth came to fruition, Yadav, Martinez and McElroy credit Greenphire’s leadership for encouraging them to forge their own paths, the company’s open mindedness towards embracing new technology and the creative challenges of the work itself for getting them where they are today.

“One of the interesting things about working in clinical and financial spheres is that the constraints make it more interesting,” said McElroy. “Problems are harder to solve, more interesting.”

All three employees admitted to experiencing a surprising amount of satisfaction working for a company in a field they’d never considered before discovering Greenphire.

“I didn’t come in with a particular interest in this field. Now it’s hard for me to even imagine being as engaged in a different domain,” said McElroy.

After spending years working at larger organizations, Yadav agrees that the smaller, more close-knit environment at Greenphire is a unique one.

“It’s a very exciting place to work,” said Yadav. “Management is open to creating new opportunities. It’s challenging, fast-paced and full of talented people. Your actions here have a much bigger impact than at larger organizations. You feel valued.”

And as many of us have experienced the “Sunday scaries” — that dreaded feeling that casts a shadow over the end of your weekend in preparation for the work week ahead — Martinez just isn’t feeling them.

“There’s a great collaborative environment here,” she said. “It is hard to find a workplace where you’re genuinely happy to show up in the morning, where you’re fully engaged in what you do, and where you leave feeling accomplished at the end of the day.”

Check out Greenphire's job openings

This article is a part of Career Trajectory Month on Technical.ly's editorial calendar. It was sponsored by Greenphire and was reviewed before publication.

Companies: Greenphire

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