Helping Nurses Take Charge

Just about everyone knows a nurse.

Whether they’re a friend, a family member, or even a medical professional that helped you through a trying time. NurseGrid is an app that strives to help those whose life work is to save and help others, by alleviating the external stress of scheduling and communication into a simple format. The goal with NurseGrid is twofold: make a simple, engaging app that declutters the chaos of a nurse’s schedule, and aid communication among coworkers and managers so nurses can keep doing the work that matters most.

NurseGrid is an app that strives to ease the lives of nurses by providing features such as colleague messaging, an interactive calendar, and live updates on schedule changes. NurseGrid approached DevelopmentNow with the goal of expanding their current product to include additional platforms; specifically Android. Having a native Android application would give their application more firepower, and create an expandable foundation for future features.  

Robust, Collaborative, Interactive Calendar

The chaos of a nurse’s schedule is distilled down to a simple, easy-to-read calendar that not only allows nurses to keep their schedules organized but makes scheduling shifts easy for managers. Along with the calendar, other scheduling features such as swapping shifts and picking up open shifts allows for nurses, their colleagues, and their managers to have quick, seamless communication instead of a jumbled back and forth over texting, phone calls, and emails. By centralizing this communication, NurseGrid strives to ease the chaos of scheduling so nurses’ can spend less time stressing over shifts, and more time giving wonderful care to their patients.

The central feature of NurseGrid is its minimalistic calendar that allows full customization, making it even easier for a nurse to see their full schedule in a glance. Adding batches of shifts can be done in a matter of minutes, and can be edited just as quickly. Along with the calendar, individual events have their own detail screens that allow a user to add notes to a specific shift, see other colleagues working the same shift, and even swap or giveaway a shift.

Real-Time Connections and Shift Exchanges

Along with the calendar, other main features of the app are colleague connections and shift exchanges. Coworkers and managers can be easily added based on hospital and department assignments. In-app schedule sharing and shift exchanges remove the stress of keeping coworker’s phone numbers and emails, making it a reliable and easy way to adjust schedules. Swapping, giving away, and taking open shifts become a simple task. Notifications such as cancelled shifts, needed on-call, and shift hour changes come both in the form of push notifications, and an internal activity log for a nurses’ own reference. By centralizing these interactions, there’s no need to go between a myriad of different apps to know when and where shifts are.

User Profiles, Personalization, and Security

In conjunction with scheduling and messaging, NurseGrid provides profile features that allow users to input credentials, keep track of upcoming renewals, edit current worksites, and more. By incorporating all these features, NurseGrid strives to simplify the administrative side of nurses’ careers by having everyone in one place.

A Transparent Process to Stay on Track

Agile Scrum was a great fit for this project. DevelopmentNow and the NurseGrid team conducted daily stand-ups, weekly sprint planning meetings, and team retros, which kept the project organized and improving with each sprint. With a specific deadline needed for launch, leveraging backlog grooming and iterative release planning kept Product Owners up-to-date on the project scope, and gave them the power to make necessary adjustments to hit budgets, deadlines, and features as needed. Since work typically expands when looked at in detail, story points, team velocity tracking, and transparent communication kept everyone on the same page.

A Platform to Simplify Lives and Data

NurseGrid Android is up to over 400,000 active users and climbing quickly. Post-launch, DevelopmentNow worked with the NurseGrid development team to hand off the source code in a seamless and flexible fashion, enabling them to provide immediate user support and maintenance.  

Overall, NurseGrid aims to help nurses help more. The app’s concept and functionality were created by nurses, for nurses – DevelopmentNow helped pull the Android pieces together. By alleviating the tension of scheduling, inter-work communication, and keeping up-to-date with an ever-changing schedule, NurseGrid’s goal is to let nurses save time, and to focus on providing the best care possible.

The communication was awesome during this project. Not just the project manager, but the developers involved were communicating early and often. That helped us be more effective.