We’re excited to announce that Work-Bench led ShiftRx’s $3.5M Seed Round, with participation from Inflect, Tau, and Opal Ventures to further their mission of building an AI Healthcare Staffing Platform. 

Just a week before my wedding in March, I was introduced to an exceptional female founder based in Austin, TX by Owen Willis at Opal Ventures. Coincidentally, she was also getting married in just two days. Despite our tight schedules, my teammate Danny and I flew to Austin to meet co-founders Autumn Kyoko-Cushman and Leann Haddad. During that meeting, it was clear: these two would be unstoppable in their vision to completely transform healthcare staffing in this country. Perhaps most fittingly, we signed the Term Sheet on my wedding day, which also happened to be International Women's Day, March 8th.

The Problem

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare staffing shortage has intensified, significantly impacting healthcare systems’ operating models and bottom lines. The supply and demand imbalance impacts every player within the U.S. healthcare system, but is particularly acute within the underserved pharmaceutical industry.

Most people are familiar with pharmacists at CVS Pharmacy or Walgreens, but according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 42% of pharmacists actually work in pharmacies and drug retailers, with 27% working in hospitals, 6% in general merchandise retailers, and another 6% in ambulatory healthcare services. 

Despite pharmacists’ important role in the healthcare system, they’re experiencing rampant turnover and high burnout rates. This creates consistent hiring and retention challenges for healthcare systems, costing organizations missed revenue, added operational costs, overtime pay, hiring costs, and more. In addition, shifting legislation from states like California and Virginia require corporate and SMB healthcare staffing levels to reach critical mass, or face closure. 

Currently, the burden to source, integrate, and train temporary pharmacists falls on existing providers, who are heavily reliant on manual schedulers, job boards, and expensive traditional staffing agencies - all of which fail to service modern pharmacies. Moreover, integrating temporary pharmacists is challenging as each facility has a unique clinical workflow.

The Solution

Facing these multifaceted challenges, ShiftRx unifies the sourcing, hiring, onboarding, and compensation for pharmacists. Their product integrates into existing clinical workflows with customized training modules to accelerate the end-to-end process by combining AI-driven onboarding modules, historical and real-time decision-making data, clinical workflow insights, and seamless EHR/EMR integrations for each healthcare facility and its corresponding providers.

ShiftRx is currently launched in Texas and California with a beta of 100+ pharmacies, 2K+ pharmacy professionals and a waitlist of 10K+ sign-ups in the remaining 48 states.

While the company is starting with pharmacists and technicians, they plan to expand to additional healthcare workers including x-ray technicians, medical technicians, dental hygienists, and other credentialed employees.

The Team

One thing that really struck Danny and I when we met Autumn and Leann was the story of their journey to where they are today. Autumn and Leann met in high school in Detroit while their fathers were undergoing chemotherapy, which inspired them both to pursue a future in healthcare.

• Autumn started her career as a healthcare provider in the U.S. Navy. During the height of the COVID-19, she went on to work with the NCI/NIH on cancer clinical research trials, and IBM’s Watson Health. 
• Leann started her career as a pharmacy technician and then on the operations side at CVS, and then changed career trajectories to insurance at Evolent Health and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Anyone who has met Autumn and Leann would agree that their tireless energy, deep expertise and massive vision is truly explosive. A prime example of their unrelenting hustle is how they signed on their first few facilities to the platform. Initially, they assumed that conventional sales methods like phone calls and conferences would work. However, they quickly realized they needed a different approach. By turning to fax machines (!), they discovered a key unlock to effectively reach and connect with facilities. Their tremendous creativity knows no bounds, and we can’t wait to see even more of it unleashed in ShiftRx’s future!  

Read more about ShiftRx in Axios and on the ShiftRx blog. Lastly, ShiftRx is hiring across engineering and sales - check out their hiring page for more!