The Ensign Services

Company information

What does your company do?

We exist to dignify long term care in the eyes of the world.

What industry are you in?

Healthcare, more specifically long term care.

Which regions does your company operate in?

In the US – we are spread throughout more than a dozen states.

How big is your company?

250+ independent operating affiliates with over 30,000 employees.

How many software developers do you employ?

We have only a dozen developers, and I’m always looking for passionate folks to join us. My team consists of data engineers, data analysts, and data operations and business process automation experts.

Please describe what your company does and give some interesting facts about it.

Since 1999, the independent operating affiliates of The Ensign Group (ENSG) have provided communities with compassionate, post-acute care. The 250+ businesses are run independently by over 30,000 employees. They foster an entrepreneurial culture of ownership coupled with a field-driven, flat structure, which empowers local leaders and their teams to provide superior solutions to the specific medical needs of the communities they serve.

Our affiliated entities offer a broad spectrum of post-acute care including assisted living, skilled nursing, and rehabilitative care. We believe we exist to dignify and transform post-acute care. Our core values of celebration, accountability, passion for learning, love for one another, intelligent risk-taking, customer second, and ownership guide us in our decision making and inspire us to be better people, in and out of work.

In recent years, we have significantly expanded our operations. Our affiliated entities are located across more than a dozen states, and we are continuing to grow. With that growth, we are innovating and designing best-practice solutions to lower the cost and improve the quality of our care. We partner with many other healthcare organizations across our service area with the goal of ensuring our patients are receiving the best possible care.

Challenges before adopting Space

What made you look for Space or alternative solutions?

We’d been using a mix of Slack, email, Jira, Confluence, and Git. It was all on-premises and a challenge to juggle.

Are there any alternative solutions you thought of opting for instead of Space?

We really tried to love Slack, but it required a lot of hand-holding when it came to the big picture. Space pulled almost everything to within arm’s reach of our chat and allows us to have threaded conversations about anything.

How was your collaboration process organized before? Which areas or steps of your process were missing / challenging / problematic?

Our previous process was complicated by the sheer amount of disparate tools and hopeful integrations between them. It was consistent between team members about as often as it was different. The problem around conversations was that they were everywhere. Space brought in what drove our conversations and allowed us to develop a topic and break down work within the tool itself, and all in one fell swoop.

Why Space?

Why did your team decide to use Space?

We’ve had great luck with other JetBrains tools – PyCharm, DataGrip, and .Net tools – and we trust them on a daily basis. My team puts a lot of trust in your tools because they help make us successful. I initially demo’ed Space for the team, and folks wanted to jump onto it immediately. This was right before the COVID-19 pandemic, and thankfully we were able to spend a little time strategizing about solutions to problems we were experiencing between the various systems we were coming from.

What are the key benefits you get from using it?

Being able to share conversations about nearly anything in the tool helps us stay productive. These conversations are critical to the success of everything we work on and are going to happen no matter what. Space makes it easy to consolidate that flow of information for each topic. The Space API made it very easy to build topical streams of data from our support ticket system, emails, alerting and monitoring systems, and third party legacy systems, which allows the team to react quickly and have conversations on the matter at hand. These conversations often result in Space project tickets, checklists, or development, which in Space are just a single click away.

Have you solved the issues you have identified in your process with Space? What has changed? Please describe any use case.

Too many to count. We are now focusing on decommissioning all the various old systems because the work has almost entirely folded into Space. My team could not have responded to the needs of our organization during the pandemic with the agility and precision that Space made possible. In 2020 my team and I had a lot of 12 hour days and 7 day work weeks. There were months of being woken up at 3 am by anxiety, stress, or fear for our residents and caregivers and the ever-changing needs of our organization. But I never once had to think about effective communication, collaboration, or availability and was grateful to have this tool.

Feedback

Describe your experience during the adoption period: was it hard to get used to?

No real problem, bugs fixed quickly, features added quickly, the product has continued to evolve while we’ve been using it and we benefited step by step without detriment.

Is there anything you would like to be improved in Space (e.g. any important features that are missing, usability problems, etc.)?

Being hosted in the EU while we are in the US creates minor day to day performance problems. I’d like to see the event system developed a bit more, and the Webhooks have limited functionality today but could be very powerful with more event types.

Would you like to learn more about the features that Space is equipped with? If so, how would you like to do that: in the form of blog posts, Twitter tips, educational videos or webinars, etc.?

I prefer blog posts, and I love that there is a stream of this info in a Space channel itself.