From Burnout to Balance- How Mesh Ai's Collaborative Scheduler delights Clinicians | Prof Shahram Yousefi PhD, PEng

A Startup's Journey to Fixing a Broken System through Smarter Scheduling

Many parts of our healthcare system are broken. Can disrupting scheduling fix them?  

Clinicians are leaving the profession faster than ever, wards are poorly staffed, and burnout is rampant. Smarter scheduling, or rather anti-scheduling, is MeshAI’s antidote to many of those problems. This is the story of how they’re building their company and how they’re contributing to fixing the healthcare system in doing so.

We touch on many topics including: 

• Why did they decide to disrupt scheduling? 
• How do they know they’re building an effective solution?
• How do they keep their company lean? 

MeshAI was founded by Professor Shahram Yousefi, PhD, PEng, an engineer turned healthcare innovator. With a unique background of fleeing war and a career spanning telecommunications to academia, Yousefi brings a distinctive perspective to tackling healthcare challenges.

 

What we discussed 

[00:00] Fact: clinicians are overworked 

[01:30] How do we solve clinician understaffing? 

[03:53] The mind behind MeshAI

[07:06] Shocking statistics: Why 900K nurses will QUIT !

[08:13] Stop calling healthcare professionals heroes.

[09:10] Overlooked method to solve clinician burnout 

[10:32] Why are clinicians overbooked? 

[12:24] To patent or not to patent 

[13:18] Scheduling and equity 

[14:29] Building MeshAI as a lean startup (and how their product evolved) 

[19:05] How MeshAI achieved product-market fit 

[21:43] Why your startup needs a clinician success team

[23:02] Disrupting medical scheduling  OR Building an anti-scheduler 

[25:09] Pricing strategy 

[26:50] Not integrating with EMRs (here’s why) 

[27:31] Are they building a feature or a product?

[29:37] Advice for digital health entrepreneurs + book recommendations 

4 Key Lessons For Digital Health Entrepreneurs From MeshAI’s Journey:

1. Involve healthcare professionals in your health-tech startup; position yourself as a partner, not a vendor. Mesh AI is not just built for healthcare professionals; it's built with them. The company is funded by doctors who believe in the solution's impact, and these professionals also serve on advisory boards and are integral to the product team. This direct involvement ensures the product meets the nuanced needs of its users.
2. You’ll know you have product-market-fit when your product is imperfect, but clients still come and stay. To achieve product-market-fit you must get comfortable with making mistakes, acknowledging them, and addressing them. To do that, you must actively seek and genuinely listen to feedback.
3. You don’t have to prioritize EMR integration. By building a product that is able to stand-alone from EMRs if necessary, you can iterate faster and more frequently. You’ll have to deal with less people, less processes, and less overall inefficiencies. 
4. Wear a 20 million market lens as you build your product. Find a solution that really makes a difference for 20 million THEN expand towards a 20 billion dollar market. To get traction early on, reach people, get them to support you, talk about you and become your ambassadors. Only then, will you be well positioned to capture a larger market share.

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Resources Mentioned:

Discover MeshAI

Mirror, Mirror 2021 Report 

Charm Health Challenge 

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Book Recommendation: Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz

Book Recommendation: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

 

Connect with Professor Shahram Yousefi: LinkedIn

Connect with Ranjani (Varadarajan) Rangan: LinkedIn

 

Follow Digital Health Disruptors on your favourite platform:
Spotify
Apple Podcasts

 

 

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Our CharmHealth Innovation Challenge is a recurring competition and a platform for innovators, entrepreneurs and philanthropists in the digital health space to present their ideas, research and innovative health solutions.

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