A Richmond startup is aiming to rework how medical professionals — well, work.
Workpath, which rebranded from Iggbo earlier this year, is continuing to expand its online platform this summer, allowing healthcare providers to manage their labor force.
“There is a really interesting logistics component” to healthcare, CEO Eddie Peloke said.
Under the older model, an organization looking for a professional to meet a patient’s needs — whether a specialist, phlebotomist, nurse or other medical worker — would go through the time-consuming and often cumbersome process of calling individual professionals to determine their availability and schedule them to perform a specific task.
Workpath shifts that scheduling burden from a third party at a desk to a centralized online hub, where health organizations can notify qualified professionals of appointment needs and those professionals can take on tasks as convenient. Other applications allow organizations to monitor appointments, send notifications to patients and keep tabs on workers’ certifications.
This summer, the platform also expanded to let agencies or organizations schedule daily or on-call shifts. Another update slated for later this summer will allow groups to use Workpath to conduct background checks.
To Peloke, the platform not only eases scheduling woes but also ties into two trends in healthcare: an increasingly mobile workforce and a shift toward more patient-centric care.
The field is “almost going back to an old model of healthcare where they’re pushing care outside of the walls of the hospital” and bringing it into the patient’s home, he said.
In a nod to the company’s past life as Iggbo, which focused on streamlining the blood-draw process, Workpath’s website highlights its application to the field of phlebotomy, noting that one adopter of the platform uses Workpath to dispatch more than 5,000 phlebotomists.
“Healthcare can be very slow-moving, but we’ve been amazed and surprised at some of the traction that we’ve gotten,” Peloke said.
While the CEO declined to provide specific adopters of the Workpath technology, the company’s website lists Memorial Sloan Kettering, MedStar and Phlebotek as users.
This past March, the firm got a boost of $1.5 million in financing and moved its offices from Broad Street to Scott’s Addition as a way to, in the words of VP of Brand Strategy and Public Relations Paul Spicer, “be around the creativity, talent and collaboration that is continuing to grow in [Richmond].”
While Workpath is currently focused on the healthcare field and was specifically built to ensure patient data is protected and the technology is compliant with HIPAA regulations, Peloke noted that the platform is easily adaptable to other industries.
For the moment, however, healthcare remains the primary focus.
As Peloke said, it all comes down to providing “the right care at the right time at the right place.”
