By: Aditi Pai

Nurse scheduling platform OnShift raised $7 million in a round led by HLM Venture Partners with additional funding from Draper Triangle Ventures of Pittsburgh, Early Stage Partners of Cleveland, Fifth Third Capital, Glengary LLC of Beachwood, and West Capital Advisors of Cincinnati. This brings OnShift’s total funding to $15 million.

OnShift will use the funds to add between 20 and 25 employees to its 60-person staff, including new engineering and marketing employees.

OnShift is a nurse scheduling and shift management system for long term and senior living care. The cloud-based program can be accessed via web or an app and offers automated scheduling, overtime prevention, and open shift management. The company aims to expand within the assisted living market for now.

“We’re solely focused in that market,” VP of Finance Mike Rich told MobiHealthNews. “There are very specific regulatory needs they have in terms of scheduling that we are able to cater to within our software and within our app.”

Rich explained the technology helps this specific sector of the healthcare market because they have an “extremely thin margin for business” so overstaffing is a big problem for them.

“First and foremost what people talk about is our ability to mitigate overtime, so when a nurse calls out sick, the easiest thing to do is ask a nurse to do a double shift and that instantly puts [him or her] in an overtime position,” Rich said. “What our software does is it lets schedulers see who is able and eligible to take a shift that will not put them in overtime now or in the current day period, and then we can blast a message either through an email or text message to say there’s a position open. Then people get that message and they can instantly say ‘I want that position’. [The message] comes back to the scheduler and literally within 10 minutes they have that schedule filled with a non overtime position.”

According to Rich, 85 percent of staffing in these types of care facilities is done on paper and Excel so if the facility is staffed with 25 people one week, it will most likely be staffed the same even if three patients were discharged. OnShift also takes that into account when staffing assisted living centers.

So far, OnShift is in 1,100 different longterm care facilities and in every US state. The company also doubled in size over the last year.

Source: MobiHealthNews