How Flatiron Health Cut Training Production Time by 10x with iorad

"If you told me I had to make a video and it was three minutes top to bottom, I'd set aside an entire week to build that. I can probably build an iorad in a day."

Overview

Flatiron Health answers oncology's most critical questions by learning from the experience of every person with cancer. The company has built a unified, global oncology engine that transforms patient experiences into actionable insights — delivering clarity at the moments when clinical, scientific, and strategic decisions can't afford to be wrong. Its core product, OncoEMR, is an oncology-focused electronic health record used across a network of care providers, feeding a research and evidence arm that shapes cancer care more broadly.

Behind the scenes, a two-person Product Education team builds and maintains the self-serve training content – tutorials, walkthroughs, and Help Center resources – that customers and internal teams rely on across every new feature and workflow update. Dave Crisante has led that effort for nearly nine years, and for most of that time, the tooling couldn't keep pace with the workload.

The Challenge: Training That Cost Too Much to Maintain

Before iorad, Flatiron's training stack was built from Help Center documentation, video, in-app walkthroughs via WalkMe, and e-learning modules built in Articulate. Each piece had a real cost.

Video required scheduling, recording, environment setup, and a long feedback loop before anything shipped. Articulate ran best on PCs, while Dave's team worked on Macs, creating constant friction.

Because OncoEMR’s screens vary by customer configuration and by patient, WalkMe walkthroughs were hard to build reliably – what worked in one seetup or on one patient record often didn’t hold up in another. WalkMe remains valuable for in-the-moment prompts and connecting users to iorad content, but that variability made it a tough fit for teaching a full workflow end to end.

"For us, creating a video was a very high-cost activity. There's logistical components — scheduling someone, setting up the beta environments, sharing it, someone's got to watch the whole thing, you get the feedback. The loop was long and it's cumbersome."

The team wasn't actively shopping for a replacement. It was timing and a manager's awareness of these pain points that brought iorad into the picture.

The Shift: An iorad-First Enablement Strategy

Flatiron started small, retrofitting existing Articulate courses with iorad tutorials one at a time. Once that reached parity, the team went back through their classroom training syllabus to find every workflow that was a good candidate for an interactive tutorial. From there, iorad became the default starting point for new feature rollouts too.

"I like to say that we have an iorad-first enablement strategy. If a team comes to us and they need something, the first candidate is an iorad."

Dave describes the product as filling a gap that neither video nor WalkMe could on their own:

"I often think of it as sort of the hybrid of a video and an in-app walkthrough. It gives me back a guided, controlled experience like a video, but it's not passive — almost like a sandbox light. We don't have the luxury of giving everyone a sandbox, so this is a way to give a real enough feel without the variability or risk of putting stuff into a live environment."

Specific features that made this shift work at scale:

Auto-generated voices — branded consistently to different audiences (one voice for the clinical inbox team, two others for physicians), with zero recording required
Step text limits — keep subject matter experts from overloading a step with information, driving more consistent customer-facing language
Multimodal output — every tutorial automatically comes in try, slide, and document form, so people can learn however works best for them, at no extra production cost
Low barrier to entry — a subject matter expert with no training-content background can hand off a rough draft that Dave's team polishes, rather than starting from a blank page

The Outcome: Scale a Two-Person Team Couldn't Otherwise Hit

The first sign the shift was working came from the field, not from a dashboard:

"Product managers started anecdotally mentioning that customers were saying, 'Hey, are we going to have those?' They weren't saying iorads — they might say videos or walkthroughs — but we knew what they meant."

The numbers backed it up:

~10x time savings per asset — a 3-minute video that took a full week to produce now takes about a day in iorad
67% overall completion rate across all iorad tutorials; 86–87% among new-user training content specifically
191,000+ iorad launches and 130,000+ completions in two years, compared to roughly 65,000–70,000 video plays over six years
437,000 views across ~2,000 Help Center articles over six years, with 300 iorad tutorials alone driving 191,000 of those views

"If you asked me how much time it took us to create a video versus how much time it takes us to create an iorad, it's at least a 10x savings. If I had to make a three-minute video, I'd set aside an entire week. I can probably build an iorad in a day."

Maintenance improved just as much as creation speed:

"If I have to go back and change a video, it's a nightmare. But if the product changes enough that I have to re-record an iorad, it's infinitely less painful."

Why It Worked: Interactivity Beats Passive Viewing at Scale

iorad worked for Flatiron's team because the format matched how their users actually behave — and because the constraints of the tool pushed better habits without anyone having to enforce them.

Video and PDFs asked people to remember something they'd only watched or read once. Dave's completion data backs up why that struggled: iorad tutorials hold a 67% completion rate overall, climbing to 86–87% for new-user training, while historical time-on-article data suggested customers often bailed on Help Center content before finding what they needed.

"People open an article that doesn't have what they need and then they go. People launch an iorad, I have pretty high confidence that they complete it."

The step-by-step format also solved a problem Dave hadn't set out to fix: consistency. The step text limit keeps subject matter experts and product teams from overloading a single step with information, which naturally pushes everyone — including non-writers — toward the same customer-facing voice.

"I like that it gets people ingrained in that habit and thinking that way, and it gets us closer to a more consistent customer language."

That combination — a format users actually finish, and a structure that enforces good habits by default — is what let a two-person team stand behind their entire training library with confidence, rather than guessing whether any of it was landing.

Looking ahead: Turning a tutorial library into a content intelligence system

As Flatiron's tutorial library has grown, Dave's team has started treating it as more than a training asset, it's become the foundation for a faster, AI-assisted way to maintain content at scale.

Dave's team built an AI-assisted content index: a script pulls their Help Center and iorad tutorial library into a set of files an LLM can query, so when a new feature rolls out, Dave can ask what existing content needs updating, what can be retired, and get a first-pass Help Center article drafted directly from an already-validated iorad tutorial.

"That's the kind of scaled work that wouldn't be possible if we weren't using iorad."

For Flatiron, iorad became more than a faster way to build tutorials. It became the validated source of truth that let a two-person team start automating the upkeep of their entire content library, turning years of institutional knowledge into something they can query and act on, instead of manually re-triaging by hand everytime something changed.

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