PRIMR Work Culture: Core Values

By: David Grew MD MPH

"Welcoming new hires who resonate with these values ensures our collective dedication to making a meaningful impact in the industry."

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As our startup expands this year, we will share our core values with every team member. With a focus on patient centricity, a preference for simplicity, and "Fail fast, iterate" mentality, our culture emphasizes a commitment to improving healthcare experiences, streamlined processes, and an innovative, adaptive mindset. Welcoming new hires who resonate with these values ensures our collective dedication to making a meaningful impact in the industry.

Here are PRIMR’s core values and why they drive our business forward:

We work for the patient.

• Our accumulated experience and knowledge are based on feedback from real patients with real problems sharing a
• their lived experiences.
• Patients teach which parts of medical treatments are hard to understand.
• Patients teach us which explanations and visuals make complex medical concepts and treatments easier to understand.
• The knowledge we gain from patients compounds over time and we harness this to improve our products.
• We exist to transform the intimacy and magic of a curated doctor-patient explanation into a scalable asset.

Simplicity is king.

• When an explanation is complex the explainer doesn’t fully understand the problem.
• We believe any patient can understand any medical problem and corresponding treatment.
• When complex problems are broken down into basic principles, the world of potential solutions is narrower and more intuitively obvious to the audience.

Fanatical attention to detail.

• Everything we create must be medically accurate.
• We must find a balance between simplicity and medical accuracy.  
• Attention to detail means extreme precision, not excessive information.
• We need to thread the needle on keeping things simple and relatable for patients but medically precise to maintain trust and credibility with physician peers.

Make it look attractive.

• Even a sketch on a clinic exam table paper can be attractive.
• We use clean lines, black and white with primary colors to avoid distracting our audience from the core medical message.
• We avoid flashy graphics which can be a crutch against the inability to stand on your clear thinking.

We are scrappy.

• We come from grassroots, based on actual conversations between doctors and patients.
• We do not have venture capital backing, we are self-funded.
• We are a lean, nimble, global team with extreme talent diversity - this is an unfair advantage we enjoy. 
• We are frugal in our spending and prioritize only the highest-leverage projects by the 80/20 principle.
• We aim to turn a profit to ensure our long-term financial viability and expand the number of patient lives we can impact.

Fail fast, iterate.

• We learn more from our failures than our successes.
• We are precise, and we do not callously or flippantly risk failure when it involves patients.  But we recognize failures with clear eyes and rapidly iterate to change our process accordingly.
• The fastest way to optimize the impact of our content and its distribution is by taking calculated risks, and rapidly pivoting off failed strategies.

Accountability.

• Each team member is responsible for executing their role.
• When we make a mistake, we own it and explain what we did wrong, and how we’ll avoid it going forward.
• Accountability also means owning your wins.  While we celebrate as a team, we call out specific team members whose efforts made an outsized impact on the outcome.

Compound by adding value.

• We harvest exponential growth by constantly seeking ways to add value to our customers.  We ask, “How can we make this solve more of their problems?”
• We are patient with growth outcomes and reject a desperate “growth at all costs” philosophy.  Instead, we believe the growth outcome takes care of itself when we “provide customer value at all costs.”
• We achieve non-linear growth by having repeat customers, in addition to steady new customer growth.