I started my career as a cardiac step-down nurse in the Army. Early on, I half-jokingly described my role as “getting the heart moving” while “touching as many hearts as possible.” (I was 22.) What drew me to nursing wasn’t just the clinical skill. It was the responsibility of being entrusted with someone else’s well-being, and knowing that how I showed up could materially change the outcome.

When the Army assigned me as a unit nurse manager, that sense of responsibility expanded. I was now accountable not only for patients, but for the nurses caring for them. My job was to ensure high-quality care while supporting a team that was grinding through the COVID Delta wave at a small, under-resourced community hospital in the Midwest.

There were challenges I expected. Long hours. Emotional fatigue. Staffing shortages. What I didn’t anticipate was the thing that would quietly consume most of my time and energy: staffing and scheduling.

It started with a whiteboard. Then an Excel spreadsheet. Then several spreadsheets.

One tab for days. One for nights. Color-coding for weekend availability, holiday balances, and the nurses who absolutely could not work three nights in a row. Symbols for skill sets. Notes to ensure new grads were paired with experienced preceptors. Formulas at the bottom to confirm we had enough credentialed staff for newborn care.

It felt like 3D sudoku.

And no matter how carefully the schedule was built, it was only ever temporarily stable. Something changed every day. A sick child. A family emergency. A positive COVID test. Each change meant rebuilding the schedule, screenshotting the update, texting it out to the entire team, and explaining what was different this time. Midnight phone calls. Early-morning contingency planning. Constant recalibration.

And then there was payroll.

Every schedule change had downstream consequences. I found myself walking to the payroll office every other day, printed and color-coded spreadsheet in hand, trying to reconcile what the system thought had happened with what actually happened on the unit. If my nurses weren’t paid correctly, that was a failure on me. If staffing broke overnight, patient care broke. And it fell on my shoulders.

Scheduling wasn’t just a side task. It was how we kept the unit running. But the time it consumed pulled me away from what I actually needed to be doing as a clinical leader — mentoring new graduates, supporting nurses through burnout, and building infrastructure to improve bedside care.

My calling was to serve, yet each day I found myself in an enormously broken system, utterly unequipped with any functional tools, and destined to do everyone a disservice. I left the bedside searching for answers, first in healthcare consulting at McKinsey and later at Stanford GSB, hoping to learn how durable operational systems were built. Instead, I found frustrating frameworks and abstractions, little of which translated to the realities of care delivery.

The journey to answer this question ultimately brought me to Vitalize.

Over the past year and a half, as Vitalize’s founding ops hire, I’ve been part of Vitalize’s journey from deploying at our first units to going live across dozens of hospitals. I’ve seen leaders regain time they used to spend firefighting. I’ve seen fewer payroll corrections, more transparency, and far fewer midnight calls.

Most importantly, I’ve seen frontline users validate over and over again that this problem is real, painful, and worth solving. I’m deeply grateful for my time as a nurse and a manager. And I’m even more excited about what’s possible when we give the people doing the hardest work the tools they deserve.

— Charlotte, Founding Ops