"Storytelling" lies at the heart of the ShareTeam platform. 

Most of us share life experiences on social media every day.  Most of us have also responded to a poll or survey.  ShareTeam "storytelling" is like a marriage between a social media post and a short survey. 

We collect and connect experiences across an entire healthcare system, creating a 360 degree view of its true landscape.  We continuously interrogate these stories across multiple layers in search of "interesting" connections and patterns. 

Communities are very important to our process.  We'll periodically prompt you to share your MaineHealth related experiences.  We'll share interesting themes from everyone's stories, inviting discussion and exploration from all.  We'll continuously share other discoveries and insights along the way.   

We use the power of this community to bring the discoveries and insights you've collectively made into the workplace.  This community is our agent for facilitating wise actions within the system that can finally begin solving the wicked problems we all want to make disappear.  

Here's the best part:  community members are rewarded for their participation.  The more active you are, the more rewards you earn.  That's some wicked goodness!

To start, the simple act of sharing your experiences over time builds an inventory of rich data filled with undiscovered insights.  These insights will be used to make your future experiences as an employee or patient more satisfying and delightful.

Second, our platform empowers patients, health care workers and others in powerfully new ways.  Visualizing paths that start with your stories and end with more desirable outcomes (or fewer undesirable outcomes) is just one example of this.

Finally, ShareTeam recognizes the value of sustaining everyone's participation.  Every community member is compensated for their engagement through an activity-based rewards framework.  You can spend this on yourself, donate it to charity, or throw a party in celebration.   You choose.

The founding members of ShareTeam live in coastal Maine.  Our region's healthcare options are dominated by this largest healthcare system in our state.  Some of us work in this system or lend volunteer support to facilities close to our homes.  We're intimately familiar with its challenges and opportunities. 

We care deeply about helping our local healthcare system become the best it can be.  This is why it's our chosen stepping stone for helping others accomplish the same thing in their own back yards across the nation.  Or the world.

No. 

Once ShareTeam identifies a systems it wishes to support, we begin building communities from the people who intersect with these systems.  MaineHealth is ShareTeam's first targeted system.

ShareTeam is a completely independent arena where community members are invited to safely engage.  Each member decides whether they want to share details of their experiences with just the ShareTeam research group, or more broadly among their neighbors in the communities they join.  Each member decides whether their participation in conversations and other activities is attributed or anonymous.  Each member decides the extent to which they wish to participate in discovering of key insights and encouraging informed actions relevant to the "wicked" challenges we're trying to solve. 

Sometimes the organizations we choose to support will elect to actively partner with us.  Active partnerships are beneficial because they enable more targeted efforts and greatly accelerate progress.  We welcome these closer engagements because of their high potential for greater impact.  But they never change the fundamental nature of our relationships with the communities we have built to support these systems.

Traditional surveys gather answers to specific questions.  They don't gather the context behind those answers.  Even the best-designed survey questions can be interpreted differently by different people (or even differently by the same person at different times).  This makes it extremely challenging to evaluate why people have chosen their responses.  The ShareTeam approach is different in a number of ways. 

First, people are invited to share experiences already meaningful to them (as opposed to soliciting an opinion or answer to a specific question without context). 

Second, we ask clarifying questions to hone in on specific meanings behind these stories (the why).  These clarifying questions are typically tied to discovering suspected conditions and characteristics relevant to shaping the outcomes people are experiencing.  This is game-changing on so many levels.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, our community framework enables everyone involved to track the "story to solution" timeline, actually measuring the impact of chosen actions against the desired outcomes the community, itself, has articulated and prioritized. 

Our moderators review every submission before it is published or made available to our core research team.  They're primary focus is to assure compliance with community standards and redact potential confidential information.

Our core research team conducts preliminary evaluations of the experiential data gathered through our platform.  They direct our engagement with the community to collaborate on analyzing interesting patterns hidden within the data (and the potential insights they hold).  

ShareTeam's unique approach to both synthesizing the data we gather and in engaging our communities in the discovery process is what catalyzes meaningful actions aimed at solving our sticky problems of interest.

Always.  Sometimes.  Never.  YOU choose.  

When you join a ShareTeam community, you're asked to provide identifying information for a variety of reasons (read more about this in our privacy policy).  Trust and safety are essential to our work, and this is why the experiences participants choose to share always start out as private (never shared with others) and anonymous unless a participant explicitly designates otherwise.    

Naturally, if participants want to enjoy the benefits of ShareTeam's activity rewards programs, they must authorize some level of identification and association.   Participants can always choose to interact anonymously and forego rewards for any given interaction.