A software company in North Bay is adding six employees to its workforce thanks to a $216,487 loan from FedNor.
With the loan, MetricAid can now go ahead and create scheduling solutions for healthcare providers in the United Kingdom.
Company co-founder and CEO Les Blackwell says because the U.K. has no strategic plan on how healthcare providers are scheduled, they don’t know from one day to the next the number of employees needed to report for work.
Blackwell says instead of having administrators compile the schedules, MetricAid has stepped into the vacuum and created the work schedules.
The MetricAid solution bodes well for the future of the company.
“This is new to medicine,” Blackwell said.
“We have no competition in performance-based scheduling.”
Blackwell says this is a growth opportunity and foresees the company entering Scandinavia with its software solutions over the next 18 months.
In addition, Blackwell expects to expand to Germany or Spain.
Blackwell says the software ensures healthcare providers get the shifts they want meaning they’re less likely to switch those shifts with someone else or call in sick.
Blackwell says he found that at the Royal Derby Teaching Hospital in England the employees used the same scheduling template every day of the year regardless if the facility saw a regular increase in visits on the same day of the week.
He says this could make it difficult for a patient if it takes a very long time to see a physician if the facility is over-crowded and under-staffed.
Two of the six employees have been hired, two more are in the process of becoming MetricAid workers and the final two positions will be filled in the near future.