Team Member Spotlight Q&A with Phil Maskelony

This week we sat down with Phil Maskelony, the Product and Engineering Director here at Continual Care Solutions, to ask him ten questions about himself and his experience at the company. Phil joined the team in March and has been a great addition, making sure our customers get the best possible product.

What is your role at Continual Care Solutions?

I work from a technical perspective to create our solutions. The bulk of my time is spent writing software, managing how it works in production, and figuring out what new features and functionality customers need.

Why did you decide to join the Continual Care Solutions team?

The opportunity was presented as serving a market that had significant needs for managing their operations and had no great solutions available, so the idea of being able to make substantial progress in the field by providing better tools was interesting and attractive. More than that, I've known and worked with Mike and Jan for more than a few years, but when as I was introduced to the rest of the team I was impressed with the depth and the diversity in professional backgrounds.

What makes Continual Care Solutions special?

There's definitely the right mix of people who know firsthand about the customers... how those customers work day-to-day and how their businesses work. More than that, there is experience in delivering solutions and bringing about change. That right mix of people is critical when creating software solutions, and why I am convinced Continual Care Solutions can seize the opportunity.

What is your favorite thing to work on as part of your job?

Two things that human beings are not very good at: remembering many tiny individual facts, and doing the same thing over and over.

That's not my favorite part, but computers can do both of those things amazingly accurately, and amazingly quickly!

I love being able to talk through a person's process and deliver a software solution that removes their time wasted doing "busywork", improves the accuracy of what they do, and lets them focus on applying their knowledge to do what they need to do. It's great when a customer sees new software and immediately recognizes how much better their job will be with it than without. The most satisfying times are when after rolling out new software, people can do more than they ever could have hoped before. I've worked on software that led to doctors being able to schedule twice as many patients than they could without, and empowering finance teams spending 15 minutes to create invoices that previously took more than a whole day, or building reports on demand in real-time that previously would take a person days to assemble. The impact in those situations can be game changing.

How has Continual Care Solutions changed since you started there?

I started in March during the week New York was recommending but not yet ordered shutdowns for the pandemic, so most visible in that time has been our pivot to 100% remote. The three days that week that I went into the office, not just our office but the entire office park was virtually empty. I'm glad I got to meet everyone before starting, because I have not seen everyone face to face since!

What knowledge, skills, or insights have you gained since starting work at Continual Care Solutions?

I am constantly impressed by how hard so many of our clients are working to help people. For all the intrinsic challenges they face in directly delivering services to people, it's discouraging to see anything else added that make their work more burdensome.

If you could do another job for just one day, what would it be?

Working on a Formula One racing team during a race: the culmination of all the work done to create something, the parsing and analysis of tons of data, the snap decisions, the execution of plans both meticulously choreographed and those cursorily thought about. The blend of humans' skill and knowledge and intuition complementing the purpose-built machine's performance is exciting.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I like cooking (all sort of dishes, but most recently making corned beef, bacon, or pastrami from scratch), camping (particularly canoe trips), and hockey (watching the R.I.T. Tigers and trying to learn enough to keep up with my 6 year old son.)

Where is the best place you’ve traveled to and why?

One of the more remote places I've been in the Adirondack Park was full of pristine old growth trees... hundreds of trees bigger than anything else typically seen on the East coast. Places like that are a great reminder of how much society and the environment can change and impact each other, and that the timescales each operates on is entirely different.

What is one of your favorite quotes?

I've not heard it attributed to anyone in particular, but "there are no $20 bills on the sidewalk". To say something simple and obvious won't be profitable and much less repeatable is virtually always correct, but on the flip side, that's precisely because whoever is prepared to act quickly will get there first. I think that is particularly true when dealing with software.