Back in 2015, as a founding member and VP of Nursing at NurseGrid, we kept running into the same problem. Technology gets built for nurses without ever asking nurses. We'd get handed scheduling software that didn't match how we actually worked, full of features we'd never use, designed by people who'd never stood in front of a patient.
NurseGrid was one of the first venture-backed, nurse-led companies out there. This was back when that was rare. We built it with hundreds of nurses and rolled the mobile app out to nurses first, for free, before we ever approached a single hospital. It took off fast. Over two million downloads to date, and it became the number one nurse app in the nation.
But hospital sales were still a fight. Nurses wanted it, said so loudly and often, and it still didn't matter much because bedside nurses weren't the ones in the room making the purchasing decisions. Their voices weren't part of the process, so their demand didn't translate into influence.
That's the exact gap NurseApproved was built to close, just applied across the entire healthcare innovation and purchasing landscape instead of one product category.
Nursing is the most trusted profession in America. Yet we have a real brand problem. We get the pat on the head while decisions about our work, our tools, and our patients get made in rooms we're not in.
NurseApproved changes who's in that room. Companies apply for the seal, and their product goes through a genuinely rigorous, independent evaluation. Their panel gets curated from the Nurse Nexus community, matched to the right clinical setting and specialty. The panel gets onboarded on the product and its intended use, then runs the evaluation and scores it. It's a high bar. Not every company or product that applies ends up clearing it. That's what makes it mean something when they do.
I'm also extremely excited about everything beyond the seal itself, and the total influence NurseApproved has across the industry. The advisory work, where we guide companies through fractional and short-term clinical strategy. The courses we build to upskill the nursing workforce. The conferences and pavilions we create at major industry events to showcase nurse entrepreneurs and nurse-led businesses. All of it is built around the same idea: get nurses into rooms they've historically been kept out of, and let their expertise actually shape what gets built and bought.
Rebecca has been a powerhouse of positive influence in the nursing community for years, and I'm thrilled to join her and the team, build on what they've already established, and bring NurseApproved to more companies and more nurses who deserve to have their expertise treated like the asset it's always been.