Sherri Douville of Medigram Tells Us How the Firm is Investing in an Innovative Culture During the Pandemic

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Sherri Douville: We have completely changed our lifestyle to focus on staying safe from COVID and focusing on our business. I have attached a table image here outlining and comparing some of the before and after COVID differences.

Tell us about you, your career, how you joined Medigram

Sherri Douville: I joined the company in 2014 as a consultant hired to work on economic feasibility and physician acceptance for primarily medical device products. One of my medical device clients, a surgeon, introduced me to the company. When I surveyed physicians on their need for the product, I had never seen anything with such a shortage, and the rest is history.

My bio is linked here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-EqTde_VKxbDfDQ57Zo_0jaoyF7cZlXfF0hON5FjjgQ/edit?usp=sharing

How does Medigram innovate? 

Sherri Douville: We’re very focused on developing people to be as effective as possible, both personally and professionally, while focusing on building a very specific culture. This is by leveraging the best evidence from our board’s experience and organizational psychology research –to foster an organization designed to innovate. We also focus on our commitment to a continuous improvement culture instead of a more typical organization’s shallow culture of blaming. Most challenges and failures are systemic in nature, especially in medicine, combined with modern-day complexities that have accelerated since Covid-19.

The simple management styles and behaviors of command, control, and blaming individuals stifles innovation and is therefore not allowed at our company. The Medigram team members are all working to continue to improve ourselves and the team and ecosystem while recognizing when challenges are system challenges and focusing on solving for that.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Sherri Douville: The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated demand for mobile computing, security, and data insights for medicine, all areas of Medigram’s focus.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Sherri Douville: We make difficult decisions every day, sometimes several times a day. These decisions are based on our values of trust, integrity, respect, innovation, security, safety, reliability, and results using principles to support those values. Many times, there can be people that disagree with the decisions or misunderstand the facts behind them. They also may not understand the decisions at first, though they normally understand the decisions better over time. The lessons learned for us are to embrace being authentic, transparent, and to make decisions based on our values and principles. Decisions made this way can always be defended and accepted even if people don’t completely understand them immediately or all of the time.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety? How do you project yourself and Medigram in the future? 

Sherri Douville: We focus on managing ourselves, our team at home, the team at work, and extended teams by focusing on our safety, both physical safety and psychological safety. Physical safety is through managing exposure to healthy air, leveraging infection control practices, and using personal protective equipment such as masks and goggles. We focus on getting adequate sleep, eating in a nutritious, life-affirming way, and exercising most days. We also focus on facts, science, principles, and frameworks. This way, we’re confident in how we make decisions. Finally, all team members have a vision for ourselves, our company, and the industry. This gives us something to look forward to and run towards. All of these actions and mindsets help us to manage stress and anxiety.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Sherri Douville: Through building our team, culture, and building the capabilities of our ecosystems, we’re excited about the impact we’ll continue to have on our industries and on improving medicine by making it safer and more efficient while relieving physicians the stress of ineffective communication modalities. There are thousands of companies that want to work in a similar space related to physician communication. However, we’re focused on defining the category.

Your final thoughts?

Sherri Douville: The pandemic and post-pandemic era both require an incredible amount of self-awareness, humility, and empathy for others’ roles, responsibilities, and life stresses. While this is all challenging, as Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist, said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Don’t ever give up on your mission. For us at Medigram, it’s to save hundreds of thousands of lives, delay disability for millions more, help health systems be more financially successful, and build a once in a generation company.

Your website? 

https://www.medigram.com