Cedar Rapids-based venture studio Novy is starting to spin up a new startup that aims to take on a big problem: Emergency room schedules, which take a long time to create and are creating physician burnout.
Novy, which launched in November 2023, aims to build innovative health care software companies.
Partners Krista Martin (pictured), Eric Engelmann and David Tominsky started the studio with a goal of launching one company per year.
Its first portfolio venture came to them in the form of an idea around emergency medicine scheduling from Nicholas Mohr, professor of emergency medicine, anesthesia critical care and epidemiology at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.
The initial idea was centered around bidding on shifts, said Krista Martin, who will serve as CEO of what will eventually become a company spun out of Mohr’s idea. Novy plans to launch the name and brand for the company in the next few months.
“Most people do not want to work nights, or a lot of people don’t want to work a weekend,” Martin said. “And so the initial idea came in of, if you had a bidding system, people could say ‘I am willing to work,’ or ‘I will only work that night shift if you can pay me x.’”
The idea involved “trying to find how you could compensate your staff in ways that would reward those who were working the undesirable shifts and be able to fill them more easily,” she said.
Every profession that has a 24-hour work shift has the problem of how to allocate that work among a group of people, Mohr said.
“One of the things that we’ve recognized in emergency medicine is that doctors and nurses in emergency departments certainly have this same problem, but people have different preferences on when they want to work, when works best with their family, the age of their kids and other responsibilities that they have outside medicine,” he said.
Novy learned that it’s not always going to be possible for emergency departments to use revenue as a lever, Martin said, noting that hourly rates are typically set in a contract.
As a venture studio, Novy’s business model starts by partnering with people in the early stage of developing an idea and co-founds a company, providing funding and C-suite talent. The studio has a six-stage innovation process that starts with ideation and ends with exiting the company through an acquisition or IPO.
“It’s a model that really does help bring a lot of resources and focus to founders in ways that maybe you don’t need in some bigger areas where capital is easier to find, or maybe talent is easier to acquire at times you need it, but the venture studio model — it takes capital, it takes resources, and then it’s a really structured process that helps get ideas into companies and generating revenue within a short period of time,” Martin said.
In the case of Mohr’s idea, it has evolved under Novy’s process.
Now, the platform allows you to input preferences on how you’d like to work in a week, Martin said. People can say they would never want to work a certain shift after a night shift, for example.
“[It’s] trying to get some of the natural patterns that people prefer into the scheduling system that lets them tell the system what’s desirable to them, instead of just using that money piece,” she said. “So it was really expanding on those personal preferences and how they can play into creating a new schedule.”
The new platform is designed to meet the “complex realities of emergency groups operating across multiple sites,” according to a news release.
Key capabilities of the platform include:
- Collecting real preference data like shift type, location, cadence and personal needs.
- Autogenerating equitable schedules that reduce fatigue and bias.
- Enabling shift trades without administrative chaos.
“You’re having a workforce that has to work weekends, nights, early morning,” Martin said. “Their circadian rhythm is constantly being challenged because they are working shifts that are not on a perfect rotation. So there’s just all these factors in emergency medicine that require a lot more intelligence and predictive abilities to make sure that your emergency medicine physicians have a good quality of personal life and professional life.”
The tool will help with setting preferences so physicians can have better family balance and avoid burnout, she said.
“And so anything you can do to give those providers a little bit more breathing room is going to help patient care and just the long-term health of emergency medicine in general,” Martin said.
Martin said Novy is calling the project “intelligent shift scheduling.”
“It’s not straight computational,” she said. “It’s taking in a lot more of that qualitative – what’s important to the provider and the group — and creating a schedule based on that.”
The team has a prototype built and is working on getting it ready for a pilot in a couple of months, she said. They will have three to five customers that will use the product in the pilot. The team is eyeing a full launch in the first quarter of 2026, she said.
For Martin, the project is also personal. Her husband is an emergency medicine physician.
“I have seen the down effects of really poor schedules, both for him personally, and then it affects your family a lot, and it’s a tough lifestyle,” she said. “I’ve been interested in the problem from obviously sitting and observing it for the last decade, but now really seeing how it could be solved in a new way with software is an exciting overlap of our two worlds that we haven’t really had before.”