Peter Murphy Lewis cried every day of his CNA clinicals. Most of it, he says on the episode, was happiness. The residents with dementia he was bathing and dressing kept returning him to the grandfather he lost while he was living on another continent, and to the grandmother with dementia he had helped move into a nursing home at 22. He enrolled for certification at 41, after his own chief executive suggested it on a management call.
Melissa Brown, chief operating officer of Gravity Healthcare Consulting, booked him for an episode called “Lessons From an Unexpected Nurses Aid.” It could easily have stayed a software interview. Peter was director of marketing at Experience Care at the time and hosted the LTC Heroes podcast, and the first half does cover the EHR. The half that stays with you is the second, where he describes what the job felt like from the floor.
Both halves run on the same idea. You cannot describe work you have never stood inside. Peter went and got certified so he could understand the people he was selling to, and what he brought back was not a campaign. It was a list of product changes and a set of stories he could not have invented. Our article on lessons from the unsung heroes of caregiving picks up where this conversation leaves off.
Key Takeaways
1. Understanding the Customer Meant Becoming One
Peter’s chief executive, Jason Long, floated it on a management call: what if you became a certified nursing assistant? Peter’s first reaction was to ask whether he would really be given the work time to do it. Over the following six months he decided the idea lined up with the three things he had been claiming about the company anyway, which were commitment, customer care and customization. His reasoning was blunt. “For me to be able to understand our customers, I needed to be one of them.” Everything else in the conversation follows from that.
2. A Charting Screen With No Room to Describe a Resident Is a Storytelling Failure
During clinicals at a facility in Kansas, Peter worked in a competitor’s system rather than his own. The activities-of-daily-living screen, he says, was clunky and left no space for description. “I was unable to tell a story. I didn’t understand what I was doing.” Because the unit was short-staffed he was not only shadowing, he was working. A new aide, a busy floor and a form with nowhere to put the detail is how the texture of a resident’s day quietly disappears from the record.
3. The Clinicals Came Back as a Product Change, Not Just Empathy
He did not stop at sympathy for the aides. He went to his chief executive with a specific request: isolate the parts of the interface a newly trained CNA has not been taught yet, so the screen shows only what that person can actually use. He credits the cardex for the rest, color-coded and sized on purpose, and compares it to buying his mother an iPhone because she could not mess it up. “It’s that participation that allows for our design team to customize our product,” he says.
4. Understaffing Shows Up First in the Smallest Kindnesses
Asked what would surprise listeners, Peter went straight to the lows. There were shifts, he says, where he had to rush a resident’s bath, where there was not enough time to put ice in someone’s Kool-Aid, or to sit and listen to someone’s story. He is describing a staffing problem, but the symptom presents as a dignity problem, and it is visible on the floor long before it surfaces in a survey. He makes the case without a single statistic. It lands because he was there for it.
5. Thirty Minutes for Mrs. K Was the Whole Argument
On his first day of clinicals a younger resident, around 50 or 55, came to breakfast and lunch. By the second day she was barely conscious, and she had a DNR. Peter, the CNA training him and another trainee took half an hour to bathe her in bed, shampoo her hair and brush her teeth. On the third day her door was closed and her name was off it. “I did something great yesterday with my team. Today, she passed.” That is the story he kept.
6. The Industry Keeps Naming Integration, Not Features
Peter asks every guest on his own podcast the same question: what is your biggest pain point