1) Tell us about your background and how/why you started the company.
I initially started my career with the intention of going into medicine, and served as a Hospital Corpsman in the US Navy for nearly 5 years stationed in Washington DC. Working on the nursing side while enrolled in my undergraduate degree, I worked in Hematology / Oncology units and Executive Medicine (primary care for top US elected officials). Upon exiting my service obligation, it was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and short staffing in healthcare systems was severely affecting healthcare providers. I had arbitrarily done a degree in Information Technology out of general curiosity, and knew I’d do just about anything to not enter the civilian nursing workforce given the current conditions and strain the pandemic had caused. I ended up taking a role in bioinformatics / managing engineering teams and projects for the NCI/ NIH working on precision medicine and cancer clinical research trials. This experience rolled me into another opportunity for working with data and customer teams at IBM’s Watson Health with large pharmaceutical companies and healthcare systems. One issue persisted throughout my entire career journey, from all ends of the healthcare ecosystem — the staffing crisis. I knew it was the problem I wanted to spend the rest of my life working to solve and I paired up with a childhood friend of mine (and now co-founder, Leann) who had also left her clinical provider position. We utilized our clinical and intimate working knowledge of the problem, my background in data and working with engineering teams, and Leann’s expertise in healthcare administration + staffing cycles to come up with our first product and what we believed would ultimately be the solution.
2) What are the key problems you are addressing and how you are delivering value to customers through software workflows?
We felt that in order for the healthcare provider shortage to truly be solved, they needed to be fully-supported and paid more to incentivize new providers and retain remaining ones. ShiftRx aims to accomplish this in the long haul by automating the back-end staffing burdens so you can remove those duties from falling on providers, reduce administrative costs and headcount throughout healthcare facilities, and ultimately increase operating margins — giving organizations the ability to increase pay and personnel for clinical staff. We utilize AI and LLMs to help healthcare facilities (pharmacies, to start) source, credential, schedule, onboard, and pay PRN workers and now we’re bridging into full-time placements as well to own the staffing cycle from end to end.
3) What have you enjoyed or what do you look forward to about working with Tau Ventures?
Amit, Sanjay, and the entire Tau team are incredible value-add investors. They are extremely well-versed in the world where AI and healthcare intersect. From our first conversation, I could tell they actually understood where we felt AI is practically applied throughout the product rather than the hype cycle talk track that was happening in Silicon Valley, and beyond. These problems we were looking to solve were mundane, routine tasks where AI could train quickly and complete the actions requested from end to end without the hallucination problems. We spoke to many other investors who didn’t quite get what we were doing with staffing; essentially allowing the computer to play tetris (spoiler: computers crush at Tetris) but Amit did immediately. And they supported our broader vision of aiming to build an Autonomous Healthcare Administrator. We’ve leaned on the Tau team for intros (we have an awesome CTO advisor, thanks to Tau!), resources, expertise, and support — and they’ve always given thoughtful support.
