Assembling a nursing schedule for a hospital ward can be surprisingly difficult—a little like playing three-dimensional Tetris, says Ilana Springer Borkenstein (MBA 2022). “It is a really challenging, tedious task.” Nurse managers must take into consideration a host of factors, including the number and type of patients on the ward and the skills required to care for them, along with constraints on individual nurses, such as the number of consecutive hours they can safely work. All in all, building schedules can take a manager up to 20 hours a week, and the results are never going to satisfy everyone.

Borkenstein knows this from experience: As a registered nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, she witnessed the difficult balancing act up close. At HBS, she teamed up with sectionmate Eric Gruskin (MBA 2022) to figure out a better way. The pair cofounded M7 Health (named for the ward where Borkenstein worked) in 2022 with the goal of modernizing nursing workforce management. Their user-friendly mobile app, powered by cutting-edge data science, is being deployed in hospitals across the United States.

Human Resources
“Growing up around health care, I saw how important a great staff can be,” says Gruskin, who helped out at his mother’s busy OB-GYN practice when he was younger. But with nurses—and the health care sector, in general—under increasing demands, getting workforce management right has become a pressing issue. It’s something that affects everything from the quality of patient care to a hospital’s bottom line. “Health care executives pay close attention to how nursing time is being utilized. They strive for efficiency in fear of finding themselves in troublesome financial situations reminiscent of the COVID era,” Borkenstein explains.

User Experience
Although the problem predates the pandemic, COVID-19 highlighted the seriousness of health care worker burnout. Among nurses, annual turnover hit record highs, and hospitals became dependent on travel nurses to fill the gaps. With M7, the founders say, managers can offer nurses fair, transparent scheduling that takes their work-life balance into account, making for happier nurses who are more likely to stay put.

Agile Software
M7 built its platform in a modular way, so it can be quickly and easily configured to meet the specific needs of any client. “We built it to work as well for surgical departments in small rural hospitals as for labor and delivery departments in large urban hospitals,” Borkenstein says. “It’s not a custom build. But it feels like a custom build to that nurse manager.”

Startup Support
Although the problem predates the pandemic, Both were excited about entrepreneurship and eager to tackle a challenge in the health care industry, so they enrolled in classes for would-be founders, including Startup Bootcamp. At graduation, Borkenstein won a Blavatnik Fellowship in Life Science Entrepreneurship, which helped kickstart the business.

Post a Comment