Business closed
It is with deepest regret and sadness that I announce the closure of MeshAI.io as of today.
Our mission to make the lives of healthcare workers and providers better has regretfully come to an end.
After close to 2 years of hard work towards a mission to revolutionize healthcare workforce management (mostly by my amazing team though), we have decided to shut our doors.
We started as we personally saw the pains of systemic inefficiencies in #healthcare that led to errors. Errors that cost real dollars and lives. Many near-death stories one of which was very close to home.
As patients we have suffered. It was only when we turned the table that we noticed how much more the providers were hurting. Physicians, nurses, medical staff, and hospitals workers from the c-suite to the sanitization and cleaning staff: all have been hurting. For far too long. It has been much easier to point the fingers at them. To blame ignorance, ineptitude, or lack of care.
Each year, errors, the first cause of death in the US, kill more than 500,000 patients. In more than 60% of these, fatigue and stress are major factors. It is short-sighted and immature to blame the providers. They are themselves victims of an ill system.
Our nurses and doctors pursue careers in health for the most part as they find joy in caring for others. In taking science and clinical research that is matured, tested, and true and applying them to alleviate others’ pains. To cure. To add wellness and promote wellbeing. To save human lives. To improve livelihoods and economies too in doing so. Public health and economical health (e.g., GDP) are highly and positively correlated.
It was even harder for us to see how stressed and frustrated they were when they wanted to help and could not do their best due to lack of resources or more importantly due to lack of proper planning. Thanks to inadequate management and strategy. When we dug more, it became apparent to us that is was not a question of money. There was plenty thereof for the most part. At least in places like Canada and US where healthcare spending is at the highest per capita (and in fact all 36 OECD countries and some more).
We noticed many imperfections. We researched more and found cans of worms after cans of worms. When we summed it up, it became crystal clear. We found the common denominator.
The largest budget item on any hospital’s balance sheet was forgotten. No one cared about it. Or they cared but did nothing to help. Or they wanted to help but were helpless and unsure where to begin.
Healthcare is human-centred and it will stay that way forever. I, for one, believe technology and tools are going to make the job of that human provider easier, more scalable, and more accurate. But we cannot eliminate the human in that picture any time soon. And that human was ‘just a budget item’ for many. The cost of human resource mattered. The HR department, the operations, and finance teams were to handle it all. The human did not matter enough it appeared.
Our doctors, nurses, and other providers were seemingly forgotten. It was all about the dollars and patient outcomes. Don’t get me wrong. Patient outcomes and quality of care matter a lot. But I think we have been missing a big part of this equation altogether. As a starter, best care comes from happy and healthy providers.
What about the health, happiness, and professional development (PD) of our providers? Where are they taken into account? The apparent presumption was that they are super-humans. That if they can prescribe the perfect pain-killers and provide the best cognitive behavioural therapy, then they should be free of all pains and anxieties themselves.
It is why our healthcare systems are here today. Every day a doctor commits suicide in the US alone. Nurses’ number one complaint is the hours of work. There is literally zero PD for most healthcare providers by their employers. It is so taboo to talk about mental health issues that most physicians hide it until it is too late to help them. It has been sad. You won’t be the first to call me too sensitive. Confessions aside. Yet, no data has ever made me cry as much as what I read and analyze in terms of quality of life for our providers. It has been grim. The more I became aware of the pains they felt the more driven I was to do something about it.
The salt on this wound is that when you look at the less than perfect patient outcomes and unhappy providers you’re also led to see an extremely expensive system that just gets worse by the day. In the US, for example, healthcare costs have been rising from 18% of GDP a few years back to now close to 22% (more than 4 trillion dollars in spending).
It looks like we are all losing this battle (well, except for a few large corporations).
When we were done with all that research and exploration, we could all see the elephant in the room. Scared of the hard work ahead for sure, yet, determined to do the best we can to help, we embarked upon this journey. We wanted to give control back to providers. To give them a voice. Mesh AI was designed through a large number of interactions involving many pain-staking hours of discovery and problem-solving with healthcare stakeholders. Patients, CEOs, government agents, and then more doctors and nurses.
As we built the Mesh AI platform, we eventually created a brand new category along with it. We firmly believed that as a starter, to give control back to healthcare workers, we need to empower them with the choice of when and where they work. With that, we can help them find ways to better manage their work-life conflicts. To be a single mother of three and be a great nurse at the same time. To be a doctor who takes care of elderly parents upstairs and spends quality time with them regularly and is a great listener and healer while on her hospital consults.
To help, Mesh AI had to do 4 things: 1) ask the right questions regarding staff’s needs as well as organizational shift /work requirements, 2) enable managers and planners to be able to handle all the data to create better work schedules, and 3) provide on-the-go adaptivity to be able to respond to the realities on the ground and changes, and 4) ensure extreme simplicity and elegance to avoid becoming a burden and truly a helper (we all know EMRs that came on to help and made things even worse).
These made us a category leader in “socially intelligent staff scheduling” cloud tools for healthcare (SISS SaaS).
Mesh AI became a cloud platform that allowed all staff to add in their personal requests, vacations, and preferences (no matter how many or how restrictive) into a calendar on an anytime-anywhere basis and also managed all team communication, swaps, and changes using any device connected to the Internet efficiently.
We then empowered the administrators with a powerful Mesh schedule automation engine hidden behind unprecedented simplicity. User interface and experience design has been extremely important to us. Admins could take all the shifts over no matter how long a period, union and job requirements, and all staff requests and quickly reviewed and approved/rejected and then created schedules at a press of a button with near-mathematical optimality. That compacted weeks of data collection, entry, back and forth negotiations, and then seemingly impossible puzzle solving into minutes and hours and as we call it a “press and forget the rest” mode of operation.
We served hospitals, clinics, family practices, and health units of all sizes and complexities from Canada to Australia. We heard it again and again: “our doctors love Mesh AI. It is so easy to use.” or “It is so easy to swap shifts when needed. It saves us hours each week.”
And then came along #COVID19. Hospitals got busy. And they they got busier. Some bursting at the seams. Staff became sick. Some had to self-quarantine. Patients flooded in. Things changed so fast that they could not handle staffing issues anymore. Shifts had to change. Some to be removed. Some to be doubled. Some units had to swap staff dozens of times a day each taking so much time from everyone involved. They all had to add extra COVID-19 clinics and hours. It seemed Mesh AI was to be needed more than ever before.
We were amazed to see how creative our customers became with our platform. One hospital Chief of Staff called and spoke of Mesh AI’s role in “infection control” in the hospital. Mesh AI could bundle staff together and keep them separate from the rest to minimize staff to staff transmissions of highly contagious agents. We were so impressed. And so proud to help that way.
We noticed we could make a bigger difference. So we made a bold decision. As we noticed one major bottleneck was the financial decision amid all the mess, we removed our monthly subscriptions (were as low as $250/month) entirely. New users could join without such worries. No contracts. No major financial decision. Just an easy call, setup, and launch in days. So what did that do to us?
Made us busier!
Made us more proud!
And we are not going anywhere.
Happy April Fool’s!
Your harmony team at Mesh AI!