E50: Nurse Builds Healthcare SaaS and Saves More Lives

Cache Flow

Dive into an enthralling tale of a critical care nurse turned tech founder tackling healthcare inefficiencies head-on. Sara Well, Founder & CEO of Dropstat shares her journey, from grueling nursing shifts to creating a life-saving staffing solution. Her startup, Dropstat, pioneers AI in forecasting and optimizing staff resources, addressing burnout, and saving lives. Listen in as we peel back the curtain on healthcare innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit that drives it.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Cache Flow Podcast.

• Sarah Well discusses healthcare inefficiency.
• The stress and burnout in nursing careers.
• Dropstat's AI staffing solution in hospitals.
• The impact of tech on bedside healthcare.
• The importance of staff retention and safety.

Resources:

• Dropstat
• Curotec

Connect with Sara Well:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our host, Brian Dainis:

• Linktree

Quotables:

• 2:21 - One of the things that I remember was said to me was, well, you're going from this 12-hour workday working three plus shifts a week as a nurse, how are you gonna manage these 80 hour weeks that that founder's work? And I was like, that's a walk in the park compared to patient management especially in a critical care setting where you really don't have like bodily autonomy.
• 09:05 - We're looking at like a 38% net decrease, I'm looking around and like, how are we gonna survive this? It's not good now and it's projected to get a whole lot worse. So to me, this just felt like, well, how would Amazon solve this problem? Would they tolerate this kind of process efficiency and overspending, which is literally driving hospitals and health systems into insolvency, right? And it just felt like it needed some technology and lives could literally be saved.
• 15:49 - Nobody gets fired from using a broken process that's been used for years, right? Someone will get fired if you try to bring in a new technology and it messes up the OR schedules, meaning there's so much at stake and the margin of error is so narrow that coupled with the fact that no one's really incentivized on a c-suite level to bring in that innovation, right? Like they're, maybe from a marketing perspective, they get their name in light more if they write the research than if they bring in the new product. They're, they're really, most of our health systems people don't realize are kind of marketing companies that are run by attorneys, right?
• 28:06 - I would say the hard part is convincing an organization to pay for an additional subscription or SaaS product. They're, you know, they look at their expenses like, you know, well, I'm already paying for all these products, you know, why would I bring in an additional product? So, you have to communicate value. Typically, nobody walks into a healthcare organization and picks up all, you know, 150 facilities. So they're gonna give you some proof of concept facilities, you can prove value there, show that they are, the return on investment is let's say 15 to 1, 8 to 1. You know, for every $1 spent on the product, you're saving 15 and you're saving 1 or 8. And that's actually the same formula that, that we use to gain investment as well, right? Like, here's how your $1 turns into 5, turns into 10. So for us, communicating the value to our clients has been really successful for our growth process.
• 48:13 - I think the most important thing is like just keep listening, you know, keep listening to feedback that you get from clients, feedback that you get from the board and feedback that you get from experienced founders. But ultimately your intuition is what got you there and your intuition and being able to filter in or out some of that advice is you, you need the same skillset that you would utilize when you take care of a child, a loved one, a pet. And you know, sometimes you'll just know something's wrong and there's nothing clinically that you can see, but that intuition is typically right.