We think hard about ways to improve our user’s experience with our app, and about more conventional business-oriented concerns like churn and lost opportunities.

This piece is an example of an initiative to improve our healthcare facilities’ experience by ensuring that shifts filled on our app were fulfilled. Since we achieved this using unconventional thinking and methods, the Working Backwards Document format was unusually important for communicating the concept and getting everyone on the same page.

Future customer quotes

“Sometimes shifts get canceled or unassigned, but Clipboard has a replacement right away. There’s no hassle and knowing that someone is going to show up makes me more confident posting shifts on Clipboard.”

“I’m not really sure what you guys did, but even when there are cancellations the shift gets refilled right away and I don’t have to worry about shuffling around my own staff.”

“For the last few months, it’s been really hard to find shifts on Clipboard. Recently I’ve noticed that there are more open shifts at the facilities I like to work at and it’s easier to put my schedule together.”

Internal FAQ

1. What’s the problem we’re solving?

Having a shift filled by Clipboard Health is not a guarantee that a worker will show up; 17% of non-deleted shifts claimed on our platform end up going unworked. For facilities, this makes Clipboard an unreliable proposition; having a cancellation on a shift where a facility expects someone to show up is worse than having no shift filled at all.

At the same time, in our most demand-constrained MSAs nurses who could otherwise work are unable to book shifts because they’re already filled.

2. Why now?

“We stopped working with Clipboard because your nurses would always cancel. There isn’t anything you could say right now that would make me come back. We’re working with a different agency now, and it has been much better.”

The reliability of our network is a consistent concern when speaking to HCFs. HCFs frequently state that they do not experience cancellation issues with other agencies. To limit HCF churn (an event to which our business is particularly sensitive) we have to do whatever we can to improve the reliability of our network and give HCFs the best possible experience in the process.

Another frequent HCF complaint is that when other agencies have issues, those agencies ensure someone shows up regardless. We can eliminate this complaint cheaply and scale-ably.