Vitalize raises $31 million to use AI to manage hospital schedules and capacity

Led by Oak HC/FT, Vitalize’s Series A funding round is supporting a platform that calculates the most cost-effective allocation of care staff in real time; the platform is already in use in 37 hospitals.

Y Combinator-backed startup Vitalize has closed a $31 million Series A round led by Oak HC/FT. Its platform brings together the management of staffing, schedules, patient flows and hospital capacity: it cross-references staff skills, contracts, costs and social rules, and bed occupancy, case heaviness and real-time admissions, to offer the least expensive team configuration for each department and position.

A colossal item of expenditure

The investor points out that "premium" work — overtime, bonuses, temporary nursing — costs American health systems about $50 billion a year, often due to a lack of tools: spreadsheet schedules, staffing units of several dozen people, health executives who spend up to two hours a day organizing on-call duty rather than providing care. Dissatisfaction with schedules is also one of the causes of nurses' departures.

Vitalize, led by Veeraj Shah, already equips nine health systems, including 37 hospitals and about 40,000 employees covered. The funds are to be used to expand deployment teams and develop new AI models applied to patient flows.