Innatify founder and CEO Scott Russell has a plan to tackle the worldwide nursing shortage by revolutionising healthcare administration, one roster at a time. It’s an idea with global impact – but one that started very close to home.

After graduating from UniSC in 2010 with a degree in business management, Scott soon carved out a high-level career in product development and digital transformation, where he led large, innovation focused teams for major organisations across the government, media and retail sectors.

In 2021, he was enjoying Christmas lunch with his family when the conversation turned to the work of his younger sister, Ashlee, who is a registered nurse.

“I’m the kind of big brother who follows his sisters’ careers, and because I work in tech, I had set up Google alerts to keep an eye on their industries,” Scott says.

“Over time, I had noticed that a lot of the baseline administration burden I was seeing in the news about hospitals and healthcare simply no longer exists in other industries, because it’s been innovated out.

“Nursing has always been a topic of family discussion, and from Ashlee’s stories over the years, it was clear to me that we just weren’t seeing the same level of innovation there that we were in other sectors.”

Scott had been on the lookout for his next professional challenge, and “over Christmas prawns and a glass of wine”, the idea of a move into healthcare innovation began to take hold.

Less than a year later, he had quit his job and was on a flight to Belgium, where he’d been accepted into the inaugural cohort of the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management’s advanced master’s program in biotech and medtech ventures.

The degree prepares executives to bring early-stage medical or biotechnology startups to market and – despite a steep learning curve – allowed Scott to quickly develop the expertise he needed to shift his focus to the complex, highly regulated world of healthcare.

With his sister’s experiences top of mind, he dove into research on the global nursing workforce shortage. A year later, he’d read more than 500 journal articles and conducted 280 interviews with nurses, hospital directors, workers’ unions and regulatory bodies in seven countries.

The result was an enormous dataset that identified 428 key challenges nurses face in their day-to-day work.

“I locked myself away and spent four or five days with the data: mapping frames to try to distill it, coding and slicing,” Scott says. “Eventually I had a framework validated by all the data points that showed the number one challenge was the administrative burden. Everything else could be traced back to that.”

From that insight sprung Innatify – a company focused solely on reducing the stress and burden of clinical administration in healthcare settings, including hospitals, aged care facilities and in-home nursing providers.

Innatify’s first product is an advanced software solution designed to tackle one of the most immediate challenges a facility must face, which is replacing the 50-120 nurses who call in sick each day.

The goal, Scott says, is to give back the countless hours that management spends looking for replacement staff, and to protect work-life balance and wellbeing by ensuring that staff aren’t called in when they’re not available.

“Throughout all my research and interviews, rostering challenges were a constant thread, for both clinical staff and management,” he says.

“In response to that, we’ve developed an advanced, data-driven model that provides a real-time assessment of the hospital’s demand across each unit, and then looks at the supply of clinical staff across the whole ecosystem at any given time.

“It’s built in a way that reduces the double- and triple-handling of contact information, sick leave and holiday leave to reduce admin hours, and allows management to immediately see which staff they have available across specialities.”

Bachelor of Business program coordinator Dr Jacqueline Burgess said she loved hearing stories such as Scott's. 

"His vision and ambition is a great example of business and innovation working at its best," she said. 

"Through research, it sounds as though Scott has identified a gap in the healthcare market and has been able to create a service that seeks to improve existing operations and the quality of life for its users."

While the model makes use of AI technology where needed, Scott emphasises that the system itself doesn’t make any staffing decisions: instead, it surfaces information and insights to head nurses and management, empowering them to respond quickly as needs arise.

After more than 10,000 hours of research and development, the product is currently undergoing validation with Clinique de l’Europe, a leading Belgian private hospital group serving 2,500 patients daily, where it is proving to save thousands of hours in senior nurse and management time.

From there, Scott hopes to roll the model out to healthcare facilities around the world, with the goal of easing some of the burden healthcare workers – like his sister – deal with every day.

“Nursing and other clinical roles are difficult jobs, and so many of the challenges are things you can’t solve,” he says. “My sister loves nursing and never complains, but the stress of being understaffed on a unit, dealing with shift work and missing important family events takes a toll – and there are millions more like her all around the world.”

And with ageing populations set to increase high-needs patient loads by at least 50 percent, he says the time to innovate to improve staff wellbeing was yesterday.

“I have so much respect for people who work in the medical profession and how much they give – it’s a debt society can never repay.

“My humble hope is that Innatify can at least give some time back, and let our nurses and other healthcare staff get on with doing what they love.”