A nurse’s schedule is often less than surgical.
“It just depends on the nurse,” said Amy Shadburn, a pediatric nurse at Randall Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland. “I just got off a three-in-a-row. You feel like you’re living at the hospital. Then you have a few days off. It’s a beast.”
Shadburn, 33, has been a nurse for two years. She works nights, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and sometimes three days in a row.
When she started, she was surprised that the hospital’s scheduling software didn’t work for her personal phone or laptop. It made things more complicated, she said, and it was a complication not unique to her own workplace.
A fix came when she was introduced to NurseGrid, a smartphone app aimed at scheduling for nurses. And, it turned out, a former co-worker at the hospital named Zach Smith was helping lead the company behind it.
“There’s a lot of technology within hospitals; it’s not from a lack of trying,” said Smith, a Vancouver native. “We made it very, very simple for nurses to visualize their schedule.”
‘A lot of holes’
NurseGrid, a startup based in Portland, was founded in 2013. Its leadership includes former nurses, such as Smith and CEO Joe Novello, who worked in an emergency room.
“Given our time on the front lines, we saw a lot of holes” in the process, Smith said.
According to the pair, the standard scheduling platforms in hospitals and nursing facilities worked well enough for general staff. But nurses’ schedules are volatile: They are longer and sometimes leak into the next day, and duties change on a regular basis.
Novello said it wasn’t uncommon to see nurses resort to drawing up their own pen-and-paper time sheets.
“If I’m working 3 p.m. to 3 a.m., that’s going to block off two full days,” he said. The kind of work a nurse does on shift changes daily, too, he said. “If I look at my calendar at a glance, I can’t tell what shifts I’m working.”
Nurses also work a succession of days, then take several days off to compensate. It can be a challenge to search through a contact list to find someone to trade shifts, Novello said. NurseGrid’s calendar and messaging capabilities are designed to be an information hub where nurses can coordinate.
“It’s nice to easily see that, if you’re going to switch your shifts with someone, you know who you can call,” Shadburn said. “If I don’t have someone’s number, that’s OK, I can message them within the app.”
Vancouver connection
Three months into his first nursing job in Seattle, Smith was called for a meeting.
His relationship with older nurses there was strained, at best. It was a high-stress work environment, and established nurses went out of their way to make it harder for the new crop, he said.
“They say nurses eat their young. This is not uncommon for new nurses,” he said, adding that it was a trying relationship because, “it can rattle your confidence and your abilities to perform as a nurse.”
So when bosses told him that he and the hospital were not a good fit, he agreed.
He told the story to illustrate the tensions in a hospital and how it can contribute to staff turnover. NurseGrid hopes to be a balm to a regular source of stress for nurses.
Smith, who graduated from Skyview High School in 2004, found a second chance in Everett. He would end up with five nursing stints in his career before he found his position with NurseGrid.
That sort of professional hopscotch should be a concern for hospitals and nursing facilities, he said. It is often more expensive to hire and train new employees than it is to retain them.
“That’s really costly for hospitals,” said Smith, now 31. “My experience is not a unique one by any means.”
Recent success
Followers of the Portland startup scene may recognize NurseGrid from the Portland Seed Fund, a program designed to bring together young companies and investors.
“The introductions to other investors was big for us,” Smith said, adding that they had been subsisting on a $25,000 early investment at the time.
The company raised $1.16 million that year. Today it has raised close to $4 million.
The app has been downloaded 260,000 times, the company said. Smith said they are able to track nursing departments that have 10 or more nurses using NurseGrid.
The app is free, but the company also sells a more advanced version for management. The company targets its sales to hospitals and nursing facilities where the free NurseGrid app has already gained a foothold. Smith said the administrators can benefit from the better scheduling, too.
“When they are short (on staff), they would go one by one calling people and texting people and trying to get people to come in,” he said.
Facing questions
NurseGrid has faced questions about how the product will distinguish itself from other scheduling software in the future, like Bookings, an appointment software unveiled last year by Microsoft.
The difference, Smith said, is that others won’t have pre-programming that is suited to the needs of health care workers.
“When you put our application in the hands of nurses, they’re going to choose our app nine times out of 10 because they can feel the influence nurses have had on the product,” he said.
The field is growing rapidly. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says there were more than 3 million registered nurses and licensed practical nurses in 2014. Both positions are expected to grow by 16 percent over the coming decade — twice as fast as the average job’s growth rate.
