Summary: While working at HealthPartners as a front desk registrar, Katrina Anderson noticed that medical students were having trouble getting signed up for clinical rotations. She had the idea to create a platform that would allow hospitals to post their schedules online so students can easily and securely sign up. LinkedIn meets Airbn is how Anderson describes it. She and her partner called their software program Clinician Nexus. Founded in 2016, the startup has already raised $750,000 and is being used in 95 hospitals and 136 school schools around the country. They're just getting started. Clinician Nexus is about more than real-time scheduling, Anderson says. The platform addresses what has become a major problem for hospitals and medical schools: providing medical students with enough clinical hours to finish their degrees. “We might not have enough physicians if we don’t have enough slots to teach them and they can’t graduate on time. When you invest in the health care system, it improves patient outcomes.” Anderson talks health care, technology, raising funds (Clinician Nexus investors include the University of St Thomas, where Anderson earned her MBA) and becoming an accidental entrepreneur. “I’m trying to grow into being a CEO. It’s not an identity I ever thought I’d work with.” So what convinced her to go for it? “A world without Clinician Nexus was scarier than quitting my job.” After our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with Dan McLaughlin, director of the Center for Innovation in the Business of Health Care in the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. He says Anderson used classroom lessons in founding her business. “It’s the theory of constraints: you look for a bottleneck,” McLaughlin says. “She found one in scheduling.”
