The nursing workforce deserves better

In August of 2020, I left my role as a bone marrow transplant nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (on an inpatient unit called “M7”) to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School. To say it was a revolutionary time for the nursing profession is an understatement. 

As COVID wore on, burnout and annual turnover among nurses reached record highs (28%+), recruitment costs were unprecedented ($60K+ per nurse), and health systems faced historic financial losses due to their dependence on travel nurses (10x increase in contract labor spend from 2019 - 2022). 

The evolving nursing labor dynamics strained health system capacity, put patient care at risk, and hit hospitals’ bottom lines like never before. 

And these issues have only intensified.

I knew there had to be a more sustainable way to support and stabilize the workforce. So I teamed up with my business school classmate, Eric Gruskin, to chip away at this set of notoriously challenging problems.

We studied problems facing nursing inside and out

We dug in by interviewing stakeholders across the nursing landscape. After 300+ discussions with nurses, managers, and health system executives, a common theme emerged: scheduling and staffing sits at the center of the nurse retention problem.

This was no surprise. As a nurse, my schedule dictated everything about my work-life balance. It controlled my sleep schedule, whether I could attend social plans, classes, family commitments, and more. The schedule is the sole lever that can be pulled to craft a work experience that meets a nurse’s personal and professional goals.

And the task of building schedules is no small feat. It starts with nurse managers, who often manage 80+ people and spend 20+ hours building each schedule. Why does this take so long? Managers must consider staffing policies, clinical competencies, experience levels, union mandates (and much more). Even the most well-intended managers can’t honor personal requests because they are simply too administratively burdensome. 

This is without even considering what a cost-effective schedule should entail. Almost no managers review dense spreadsheets distributed by the CFO with forecasted patient volume to ensure they staff proactively. 

Building a schedule is a complex data science problem that has huge implications on nurse experience and hospital expenditure. It shouldn’t be this hard to get it right.

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And the problem does not end with scheduling

Once a schedule goes live, a combination of nurse supervisors, charge nurses, and central staffing coordinators are responsible for ensuring that schedules meet real-time patient care needs.

To maintain margin, hospitals ask their clinical leaders to do the impossible: meticulously balance labor hours with patient volume all while running to codes, rapid responses, and tending to patient care needs. 

They use a combination of paper, spreadsheets, homegrown dashboards, Facebook groups, and 2 - 3 meetings per day to track hospital productivity metrics (read: finances) and try to make safe and cost-effective staffing decisions.

Nurse leaders can barely get by with these tools when everything goes according to plan on the shift… but that never happens. 

When an unexpected change in census, callout, or staffing issue arises, preferences, fairness, and financially-informed decision making falls by the wayside. This leads to staff dissatisfaction and unnecessary spend for hospitals.  

So we built a long overdue solution

We built M7 Health hand-in-hand with nurses throughout the country to be the first user-friendly tool that supports the end-to-end nurse staffing workflow. 

M7 helps hospitals craft schedules that optimize for staff preferences, fill shifts more effectively, keep a pulse on staff sentiment, and offer decision support tools to nursing supervisors who make just-in-time staffing decisions.

By incorporating preference data directly from nurses, we’ve gained trust and engagement from the workforce: 

• 99% of staff log in to M7 monthly
• 51% of staff with access to M7 log in daily
• Nursing Supervisors report a 50% reduction in their administrative workload
• Managers report spending an average of less than 1 hour on scheduling building (20+ hours saved per schedule cycle)
• Nurses report better control over their schedules and work-life balance
• Nurses report fairer more transparent schedules 
• Nurses have reached out to M7 hospitals to inquire whether there are open roles, specifically citing M7 as the reason for their interest

CFOs love M7 too: 

• Hospital have seen reduction in cost per labor hour (HPPD) by up to 5% 
• Service lines have seen reduction in overtime by up to 48%
• One hospital completely eliminated in-house contract labor
• CFOs have referred M7 to their peers at other hospitals

Our customers rave about the M7 experience

We went live in our first hospital in September 2023, starting with just one service line. M7’s impact was so strong that we were immediately asked to expand to the entire inpatient hospital. 

In just the 12 months since, we have launched across 8 hospitals and currently serve thousands of nurses and nursing support staff throughout the country, with many more to come! 

Most excitingly, we constantly hear feedback like: 

• “I’ve never seen software this intuitive. It was clearly built by nurses” - Chief Nursing Officer
• “This was a huge organizational win for us… and we really needed one!” Associate Chief Nursing Officer
• “I was rarely able to make it to my son’s basketball games before M7. This has been a big satisfier for all of us here” - Staff Nurse
• “This isn’t just a scheduling platform – it’s my one-stop-shop for work” - Staff Nurse

We are looking for more mission-driven team members to supercharge our impact

‍We're a small, scrappy, and highly mission-driven team, 100% focused on building solutions that make the nursing profession more sustainable and attractive.

If you’re excited about what we’re building here at M7, we’re hiring! We have a number of career-defining opportunities for folks motivated by making a real difference.

You can check out available opportunities at M7, including our Head of Engineering role and Business Operations & Analytics role.

We’re also looking for mission-oriented builders across other roles. Check out our full list of job openings. 

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