Accolade Internship

What is Accolade?

I spent this past summer (2017) interning at a company called Accolade.

Accolade is a self-described “healthcare concierge,” meaning that they provide services to help people navigate the complexities of the healthcare system. They do this largely with “health assistants,” employees trained to take calls where they answer questions and provide guidance.

Accolade’s services improve the experiences and outcomes of those consuming healthcare and save money for their employers by helping users get the right care and advice when they need it.

This includes: helping them find doctors and schedule appointments, answering questions about coverage and benefits, understanding bills and claims, and so on. For instance, we interns listened to a sample phone call where a health assistant stayed helped one woman get her children onto her health insurance plan.

One thing Accolade isn’t is a call center. Every time you call you get the same person and your designated health assistant is free to talk for as long as you need.

As of now Accolade serves relatively big customers like Lowe’s, Comcast, and the Temple University Health System though they hope to serve smaller companies in the future.

What did I do?

Over the course of my 10 weeks at Accolade (6/12/2017 - 8/17/2017) I worked as a software developer intern on the “identity” team, known officially as Dragon Team.

Dragon is responsible for Accolade’s API Gateway (the interface to the company’s web APIs/services) as well as identity-related web services used for things such as user and employee authentication and authorization: “who’s who and what can they do.”

Within Dragon, my job was nebulous. I was a member of the team, and worked on items in the backlog that a regular team member would do – provided I had the know-how and it wasn’t something that could blow up one of their development environments (like manually entering data into a database). This included tasks related to user provisioning (automating the process of granting access to users) and refactoring code in various microservices in Accolade’s API cloud platform. I also tested and gave feedback on the work of others on my team and wrote some API documentation.

Aside from that I gained new experience with Scrum: Accolade’s software development framework of choice. Over the course of a handful of 2-week sprints, I participated in daily stand-ups, regular backlog grooming, and wrote several user stories. I also took part in planning and retrospective meetings every sprint, team powwows for estimating work at the start of the sprint and evaluating our performance at the end.

My experience

Overall, the team and everyone else at Accolade were friendly and welcoming across departments and job titles. The open office layout also made for a close-knit experience with coworkers that encouraged collaboration and created an atmosphere of respect and equality.