Opening their center doors in early 2018, Keene Perspectives provides early intervention services for children with autism and their families using the principles of applied behavior analysis (ABA). The healthcare provider, started by behavior analysts Chris and Cortney Keene, is based in White River Junction, Vermont and has 20 employees. 

When the COVID pandemic hit in early 2020, Keene Perspectives was forced to transition their services to a telehealth model for eight weeks. And like every other business at the time, they had to find a way to effectively share policies, procedures, and best practices across their newly remote workforce — which was especially important given their industry’s clinical standards. And that’s when they found Trainual.

“Trainual has been highly effective because the ease of keeping it growing and changing with us has been invaluable.”
<blockquoteauthor>Cortney Keene, co-founder of Keene Perspectives<blockquoteauthor>

A platform that ensures consistency and compliance no matter what

Keene Perspectives was a little over two years old when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, forcing an overnight shift to remote telehealth clinical services. “I was sitting at home making plans for what we were going to do for our employees, for our clients, for our services,” said co-founder Cortney Keene. “A Facebook ad for Trainual popped up. I investigated and thought: This is exactly what we need.”

At the time, Keene Perspectives relied on makeshift Google Docs (“and Post-It notes on my desk”) to manage essential information and train the clinicians on their team. But as Cortney and Chris continued to manage the overnight regulatory changes caused by the pandemic, they realized they needed something to help them with both training consistency and centralizing their knowledge. And Trainual provided that solution.

Click "Next" 👆 to see how Keene Perspectives uses Trainual. Want a closer look? Click to explore the training in a new window.

“We utilize Trainual for lots of different reasons. Our policies and procedures are compliance-based. We also integrate a lot of our clinical training into Trainual, so [employees] also take away a lot of the information that they need to then develop the skills to work with our clients directly.”

With regulated healthcare standards in constant motion, Trainual offered the missing link — a fluid system keeping everyone up-to-date. “It’s been highly effective because the ease of just keeping it growing and changing with us has been invaluable,” Cortney remarked. Streamlined content editing and the ability to add new documentation on-the-fly brought great relief.

An easy-to-update playbook for a growing business

While they initially signed up for Trainual for continuity support, Keene Perspectives soon experienced the benefit of having such an easy-to-update system. “We’re iterating [Trainual] probably on a weekly basis,” said Cortney. “I’m onboarding a new team member right now, and every day I’m in there thinking ‘Oh, I need to change this’ based on feedback.”

And with so much of their business in Trainual, the team can increasingly self-serve answers, rather than repeatedly asking Cortney the same basic questions. "As we started to build capacity in our team, they could be documenting and providing us feedback and ideas for things that should be in Trainual. That just allowed us to get so much more in there, which just saves [employees] time conveying information to team members they work closely with," she recalled.

As Keene Perspectives charts a course toward continued scale and impact, Trainual travels with them as an evergreen playbook. And Cortney also noted improved role clarity from mapped org charts and job descriptions accessible 24/7 through Trainual. “We just walked the team through a recent reorganization using the role chart so they understand who to go to," she said.

“Trainual has allowed us to move our company forward because we're able to simplify and make that information sharing much more efficient.”

An organizational tool to help founders escape the day-to-day

With ambitious goals as healthcare providers, Keene Perspectives leaders Chris and Cortney Keene knew they couldn’t sustainably fulfill their mission while also bogged down running daily operations.

“My husband and I, as owners, just needed to get information in [Trainual] and know it would reach employees without taking our time,” explained Cortney. While still licensed clinicians, they recognized the need to separate from routine service delivery.

"We never want to fully separate from frontline work to ensure our interventions align to industry standards and our values," she shared. So, they now strategically do clinical work while dividing the work of business owners along their complementary strengths. “I’m supporting the organization and industry at a broader level by applying our clinical approach to the team and overall operations,” described Cortney. "And Chris oversees our clinicians' development, technician training, and intervention implementation to ensure standards consistency and treatment fidelity."

This calculated delegation of control and oversight wasn’t easy. Finding harmony balancing big-picture leadership while keeping authentic ties to their practice took thoughtful change management.

But with the confidence Trainual brings — knowing critical information flows freely without their direct involvement — Cortney and Chris can finally enjoy the space to split focus further between organizational growth and clinical excellence without sacrifice. "We’re capturing everything so we can more efficiently train folks joining us," highlighted Cortney. Their robust, iterative training content in Trainual is the ultimate insurance policy, allowing them room to breathe and lead into the future.

Through a combination of people and technology, Keene Perspectives positions itself for the next level of community impact. With a trusted foundation for communicating essential information to staff, the team behind the clinic sees their work helping more families — thanks to the scalable consistency that Trainual facilitates behind the scenes.