emergency messaging, he adds. If, for example, a hospital wants to inform its nurses about an upcoming training session, the schedulers can send out automated phone messages to everyone who’s required to attend. “They can customize the responses,” Browning says. “For example, they can say, ‘Press 1 to come Monday at 7 a.m., or ‘Press 2 for Tuesday at 3 p.m.'”
YourNurseIsOn designed its software so it could be used by a range of customers, from small, independent hospitals to large healthcare systems, Browning says. Browning sketched out the basic plan for the technology, he says, then hired software engineers to bring it to life.
The platform is designed to be simple enough for healthcare providers to implement on their own, but Browning and his staff have spent a lot of time on site with their customers—largely to pick up ideas for how they might improve the technology going forward. “We want to learn the process,” he says. “Where do they feel the product may have limitations that we can fix? It’s important for us to be very tightly engaged with our customer.”
Browning, who received a master’s in nursing at Yale University, says his years of working for hospitals and nurse-staffing agencies all over Connecticut have been essential for developing and refining his product. “When I’d go to work in a facility as a supervisor, I was expected to maintain a level of care that would allow us to interrupt problems before they occurred,” he says. “I had to make sure the place was operating at full efficiency. Very often I’d walk in and get handed a list of names and numbers. I’d start calling people, maybe 15 or 20 per hour. With our system, you can do that, literally, with a couple of clicks.”
The company brings in revenues from licensing fees, which it charges on a per-user basis. Browning’s seed funding came largely from family and friends, he says, along with some angel investors he declines to name. He is working on raising a $2 million funding round that he hopes to close in the second quarter.
Browning says he plans to build out his tech team to help improve YourNurseIsOn’s functionality. He hopes to add “geo-location” capabilities for home-based health providers. “We want to be able to allocate providers based on their location and patient need. If a patient needs to be observed, and a home health aid is close by, they can get there,” he says.
YourNurseIsOn does have some competition, most notably from Kronos, a Chelmsford, MA-based maker of workforce-management systems that has also introduced a scheduling system. But health facilities have to convert to Kronos’s larger workforce-management platform before they can use the scheduling software, Browning says. YourNurseIsOn, by contrast, can be used as an add-on. “One of our strengths is we’re able to integrate with systems that are currently in place, proprietary or enterprise,” Browning says. “We feel that flexibility will serve us well in the marketplace.”
