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Two years ago today, my best friend and co-founder Leann Haddad and I had an idea:
What if we could help solve the healthcare provider shortage?
And in doing so, improve patient outcomes at scale?
Our hypothesis was simple, but bold:
- Increase pay for healthcare providers.
- Give them better access to support and resources.
Do that, and you not only keep providers in the workforce—you make the field attractive again.
We knew firsthand how personal this work is; we were the healthcare providers who burned out.
No one becomes a healthcare provider on a whim; it’s a calling. Whether driven by a love of medicine, a desire to help others, or the pursuit of financial stability, the work is hard, and it’s human.
But the system is failing on its own.
Leading up to that idea in May 2023, we’d been digging into the numbers: burnout, turnover, medical errors. What we found was staggering.
- At the time, about one-third of providers planned to leave the field within five years.
- Medication errors were costing the U.S. system $40 billion annually.
Fast forward to today:
- Nearly half of healthcare providers are planning to leave their clinical roles within the next year.
- Medication error costs have ballooned to $77 billion.
- Burnout isn't just a crisis—it's a system-wide collapse in slow motion.
As former clinicians ourselves, Leann and I knew that if we didn’t try to change it, who would?
We started ShiftRx with nothing but a mission.
We came up with the name, decided to start in pharmacy, spun up a horrifically designed platform– and got to work.
Our belief:
By automating the administrative grind—credentialing, scheduling, back-office logistics—we could give providers their time back.
And if we did staffing better, faster, and cheaper than legacy agencies, we could make the economics work in providers’ favor, not against them.
We had both lived the reality of long days in clinic, followed by hours of charting, ordering, begging coverage from undertrained temp staff that wasn’t set up for success.
It was broken from every angle.
Today ShiftRx’s PRN marketplace is live in all 50 states, with 10,000+ pharmacists and technicians working hundreds of shifts each month.
We’re now building the next evolution:
An AI-native scheduling platform that consolidates credentialing and workforce management, purpose-built for health systems.
Our goal?
- Return time to providers
- Improve care by reducing administrative drag and human error
- Boost pay
- Increase productivity
- Directly attack the root causes of burnout and poor patient outcomes
Everything starts with our healthcare providers.
Keeping that as our north star has never steered us wrong.
I’m endlessly grateful to build this company—
With the smartest people, on the hardest, most meaningful problem of our lifetime.
We’re not just trying to fix staffing and scheduling;
We're fixing healthcare.
Healthcare for all.
Above all else.
— AK and Leann