Nurse Innovators Take the Spotlight at ViVE 2025

With a spotlight on healthcare innovation, ViVE has quickly become a premier event shaping the future of health technology and business. Set for February 2025, this year’s conference will bring together over 8,000 healthcare executives, investors, and innovators. Among the participants is the Nurse Innovation Cohort, showcasing their groundbreaking work at the Nurses Pavilion. Curated by NurseApproved, this group features nurse-founded and nurse-led innovations driving meaningful change in healthcare. In this article, we’ll explore their cutting-edge contributions.

About The Nurse Innovation Cohort

As healthcare evolves with new technologies and strategies, nurses remain at the forefront of driving impactful change. Recognizing the power of nurse-led solutions, NurseApproved has selected a distinguished group of nurse innovators to join the Nurse Innovation Cohort at ViVE 2025. These trailblazing professionals will not only represent nursing at one of the most influential healthcare innovation conferences but also showcase the critical role nurses play in shaping the industry's future.

Meet The Cohort

M7 Health: Ilana Borkenstein

Nurses are the largest sector of the healthcare workforce – the backbone of the healthcare system - yet the least invested in and the least technologized.

M7 is changing that.

The last four years have highlighted how critical nurses are to the health of our communities. Amid a record nursing shortage, health systems must make the nursing role more sustainable and attractive to sustain a strong workforce that meets their patients’ needs.

M7 is the technological layer health systems depend on to unlock the operational and organizational changes that the modern nurse demands.

Streamline Flow: Amanda Schleede, Shannon Hattenhauer, and Kelly Ayala

Amanda Schleede

Streamline Flow (SLF) is your team’s centralized platform to track and manage patient care plan adherence regardless of diagnosis. We reduce patient leakage, loss to follow-up and improve adherence to their care plan and clinical trial protocols, which improves patient outcomes. EHR's provide minimal support for longitudinal patient care. SLF brings all the 'pieces' together to identify patients that are at risk of not complying with their care plans. SLF clearly identifies the next step in patient care to both the care team and patient. No longer are you ""digging through"" the EHR to find the data you need – SLF provides immediate visualization, with Clear Connected Care.

Amanda has over twenty-five years of healthcare-focused experience within the management consulting, service, and venture capital worlds. She is an entrepreneur at heart and her extensive healthcare experience provides further insight into the needs of the provider and consumer.

Shannon Hattenhauer

Shannon Hattenhauer, RN, BSN is an Interventional Pulmonology Coordinator where she first-hand helps patients navigate through appointments, biopsies, testing and specialty departments. Shannon also serves as a nurse resource to a community based wellness center where she trains community health workers. Shannon is passionate about ensuring patients feel supported and know the next steps of their healthcare journey.

Kelly Ayala

Dr. Kelly Ayala, DNP, APNP, BSN is a primary care nurse practitioner. She enjoys creating process maps in her free time and looking for patterns to improve care for patients, particularly underserved or marginalized communities. Kelly is also the co-founder of Hear Now, a nurse created software for one-way communication that enables family and friends to send encouraging messages and news to stay connected. Kelly’s passion for creating Streamline Flow comes from her work with patients who don’t know the next step and need to reach a diagnosis and receive continuity of care. She needs Streamline Flow to work for her nurse and scheduling colleagues who are overwhelmed, using manual processes to manage large high risk patient populations. Kelly needs Streamline Flow to work for her provider colleagues who want to provide the best care for each patient and need the system to work.

NurseBrain: Samu Mhlambi

Samu Mhlambi, RN, BSN, MCiM, is a dynamic healthcare leader, combining over 14 years of nursing experience with expertise in software development and clinical informatics. A graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine and a current DNP student at Yale School of Nursing, Samu is dedicated to creating groundbreaking solutions that elevate patient care to new heights. As the CEO of NurseBrain AI, a pioneering nurse workflow automation platform, he is optimizing healthcare operations, driving financial sustainability, and ensuring resources are focused where they matter most: providing exceptional patient care.

Commission for Nurse Reimbursement: Sharon Pearce and Melissa Mills

Sharon Pearce

The Commission for Nurse Reimbursement (CNR) was founded in April 2023 by Rebecca Love and Sharon Pearce with a clear mission: to transform how nursing care is valued and reimbursed. Our goal is to address the critical financial challenges that have contributed to the nursing shortage and, ultimately, improve patient care.

We believe that nurses are the backbone of the healthcare system and that their invaluable contributions should be recognized financially. By advocating for nursing care to be viewed as a billable service rather than an expense, we aim to elevate the profession and ensure its sustainability for the future. Sharon Pearce is a Policy advocate accustomed to leading and supporting ongoing grassroots efforts to build relationships with congressional leaders, state and federal agencies. A long-time leader of state and national professional associations representing more than 50,000 members. Helps develop and continuously foster a proactive legislative agenda and monitoring of legislative and administrative actions likely to impact association members. 

Consistently plans and conducts advocacy and outreach to garner organizational support. Frequently speaks about, and provides training on policy and coalition building to organization members. Develops strategic legislative agendas and coordinates volunteers to assist with policy campaigns.

Melissa Mills

Melissa L. Mills, RN, is a seasoned nursing leader with over 26 years of experience dedicated to transforming nursing education, workforce development, and patient care. She has been licensed in Ohio her entire nursing career. Her extensive clinical background in diverse healthcare settings fuels her commitment to solving critical nursing challenges.

Melissa is a passionate advocate for addressing nursing shortages, burnout, and the urgent need for innovative training solutions. As the Head of Content at Cinematic Health Education, she revolutionizes how direct care workers are trained and retained. As the fractional Executive Director of the Commission for Nurse Reimbursement, she champions fair reimbursement structures for nursing services.

Melissa's mission is to elevate the nursing profession by inspiring nurses to embrace their roles as leaders and change-makers. She actively shares her passion and positivity on LinkedIn, helping staff nurses and nursing leaders find their passions and gifts to use them in new ways within healthcare.

PocketRN: Mirini Kim, DNP, RN, CPNP-PC

Mirini Kim, DNP, RN, CPNP-PC, pioneers the delivery of PocketRN’s innovative model of virtual, nurse-led care that places expert, empathetic nurses at the center of healthcare–particularly in the home. In a system that often leaves patients and families without support between provider visits, PocketRN bridges the gap by empowering nurses to deliver high-touch, personalized, and proactive care. By using video-enabled, AI, and RPM technologies to augment nurse care, PocketRN also creates sustainable and fulfilling remote opportunities that meet the diverse needs of the nursing workforce.

Under Mirini's leadership as Chief Nursing Officer, PocketRN is uniquely dedicated to fostering a community where nurses feel valued and empowered to deliver proactive care. She works closely with a nursing team that spans across the country, gathering continuous feedback to refine clinical workflows, protocols, and training. Beyond this, Mirini builds a sense of belonging among PocketRN’s remote nurses by organizing engaging activities, social events, and professional development opportunities. Her efforts are pivotal in creating fulfilling and flexible roles for nurses, whether they are new graduates or experienced professionals seeking more adaptable hours.

Empowered with technology, clinical resources, and a supportive community, nurses are poised to close the gaps in today’s healthcare system. If nurse-led care were widely adopted, it would pave the way for a more sustainable and compassionate future. Patient outcomes would improve, reducing the strain on clinicians and hospitals, while nurses—long undervalued and overwhelmed—would find renewed sustainability and longevity in their careers.

Nelo: Dr. Chi Nwaogbo

 

Nelo was founded out of a personal mission to enhance healthcare safety. Chinelo, a nurse practitioner with over 15 years of experience, faced firsthand the dangers of needlestick injuries.

This exposure to daily safety challenges inspired the development of Nelo’s Smart Disposal System, a user-friendly product designed to protect healthcare workers. ""Nelo"" reflects the mission of safeguarding others, offering smart protection with minimal intervention. Nelo’s Smart Disposal System directly tackles these risks with smart technology, automation, and simplicity. By integrating RFID-based monitoring, automated alerts, and contactless disposal, Nelo ensures healthcare workers stay protected and compliant, minimizing the risk of injury while maximizing efficiency.

 

Humla Health: Jessica Sylvester

Humla's streamlined, tech driven platform provides your health system care facility with the ability to fill open shifts per diem to long term assignment quickly with credentialed W-2 nurses, helping to manage patient safety and staff burnout without the agency cost. We were built by nurses, for nurses. We've experienced burnout, staffing shortages, and resource limitations first hand. We've felt the stress of trying to fill in the gaps and making tough financial decisions. With Humla Health, you can: -Increase Patient Safety -Budget with more confidence -Manage Risk and Surge Plans -Fill shifts on demand

Nurses Feed Their Young: Teresa Sanderson

A veteran RN and nursing leader with 3 decades of experience, Teresa Sanderson experienced “nurses eat their young” culture as a nursing student and found the harsh culture present in 90% of the healthcare organizations that employed her. She learned on her own how to manage incivility, conflict, and how to deal with “strong personalities,” while at the same time watching other nurses leave the workplace for the same reasons. Today, she challenges nurses to Dare To Do Nursing Differently® and create a better future for nursing.

Teresa founded the Nurses Feed Their Young® movement to transform nursing culture from one where “Nurses eat their young” to one where “Nurses FEED Their Young® (NFTY).” She has established the Thriving Nurse Network, an online peer support community for nurses designed to help nurses move from feeling insecure, undervalued, and isolated to supported, empowered, and confident in their nursing careers. With 25 nursing experts on the platform to serve and support nurses, Thriving Nurse Network is dedicated to supporting nurses to thrive both personally and professionally.

A licensed and certified trainer of the B.A.N.K. Methodology, she trains healthcare organizations, nursing leaders and nurses on emotional intelligence, applications of personality science to nursing, and recruitment and retention strategies. A major depression thriver, Sanderson is a speaker, author, nurse entrepreneur and homesteader.

She resides on a homestead in rural Northeast Kansas with her husband, livestock and honeybees.

Contact her at hello@teresasanderson.com

National Nurse Practitioner Entrepreneur Network: Lynn Rapsilber DNP, APRN, ANP-BC, FAANP & Lorraine Bock DNP, ENP-C, FNP-C, PHRN, CEN, FAANP

Dr. Rapsilber is Co-founder and CEO of the National Nurse Practitioner Entrepreneur Network (NNPEN), which provides business education to NPs sorely lacking in our education and training. Business education, support resources, partnerships with those who understand NPs, and the nursing model of care delivery are the value we bring to NPs who identify problems and find solutions in the communities with which they serve. NNPEN is creating a community of NPEs one practice at a time to change the trajectory of healthcare. She curated the Business Basics Accelerator course and business webinars. As CEO, Dr. Rapsilber seeks opportunities to partner with entities who understand the nursing model of care delivery The company has grown year over year to become a trusted agent for NP Entrepreneurs. We no longer want to be known as the “best kept secret.”

Andrews Healthcare Consulting: Logan Andrews, APRN, FNP-BCFAANP

Andrews Healthcare Consulting is committed to providing affordable, patient-centered medical care to those who need it most. The company takes pride in its strong connections within the community, focusing on delivering personalized healthcare solutions that meet the unique needs of each individual.Through its comprehensive house-call program, Andrews Healthcare Consulting offers primary care and mental health services directly in the comfort of patients’ homes. This eliminates the need for travel to doctor’s appointments, with additional in-home services such as X-rays and bloodwork available to ensure comprehensive, convenient care. Andrews Healthcare Consulting is redefining accessibility, bringing high-quality healthcare to every doorstep.

Meru: Venkat Krishnan, Rohan Arora, and Dayna Dixon PhD, RN, NPD-BC, CPHQ

Venkat Krishnan

 

 

Venkat Krishnan is the Chief Technology Officer at Meru. With experience at Tesla and a background in Artificial Intelligence, Venkat is passionate about leveraging AI to solve complex problems in healthcare. He is also a member of the AMIA 25x5 Documentation Burden Reduction Committee.

Venkat has been instrumental in guiding Florence’s use of advanced large language models (LLMs) to process nuanced clinical language, including diverse accents and dialects, ensuring accurate real-time documentation and seamless EHR retrieval. Venkat has led the development of internal tools to streamline EHR integration, making it easier to connect with various systems while maintaining reliability. He also tackles key challenges like reducing latency in real-time data processing, and ensures Meru’s systems are compliant with the most stringent standards related to data integrity and the mitigation of bias in artificial intelligence.

Venkat finds it deeply rewarding to address these technical challenges, knowing they directly enhance nurses’ ability to focus on patient care. Building technology that balances cutting-edge AI with practical, real-world usability for one of largest and most critical groups in healthcare is what drives his work at Meru.

Rohan Arora

Rohan Arora is the Chief Executive Officer at Meru. Rohan had previously worked at Johns Hopkins in artificial intelligence and is a member of the AMIA 25x5 Documentation Burden Reduction Committee. Rohan started the company with Venkat Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer, after they noticed that a number of technical companies in the market were catering to provider needs and provider workflows, but there was no dedicated, innovative, cutting-edge company that served as a dedicated partner to nursing leaders and nursing organizations. Meru was conceived to address that gap, and serve as vendor partner for Chief Nursing Officers and Chief Nursing Informatics Officers, helping improve the efficiency of nursing operations and reduce burnout in nursing by leveraging new technologies.

After witnessing the focus on impact ambient artificial intelligence could have on physician burnout, Rohan and Venkat recognized that a similar solution was needed for the nursing space, and that it had to be built from the ground up with nurses rather than be a hand-me-down version of what was already available for physicians. Eventually this insight, along with Dayna’s clinical expertise, led to the development of Florence, an ambient quality co-pilot designed to assist nurses with their everyday workflows. Florence is designed to assist in both the retrieval of information from the EHR, and ambiently document patient interactions to automate flowsheet completion in the EHR. It is the only platform on the market that does both, delivering a significantly higher return on investment for health systems, and, importantly, contributing to a much more significant reduction in burnout.

Dayna Dixon PhD, RN, NPD-BC, CPHQ

Dr. Dayna Dixon is the Chief Clinical Officer at Meru, creators of Florence a Nursing Clinical Quality Co-Pilot within the ambient nursing documentation space. Florence allows the nurse to stay connected to their patient data, document through ambient care interactions and support patient engagement. Additionally Florence can provide layers of customized guidance regarding elements of care such as wound management. At a time of unprecedented burnout and turning over and escalating care costs (just one hospital pressure injury can cost a hospital approximately $68,000). It has become imperative to create solutions to support some of the root causes of care deviation such as the widening nursing experience gap. 

Dayna joined the team after meeting founders Rohan Arora and Venkat Krishnan at HLTH USA 2024. As members of the ANIA Documentation burden task force Rohan and Venkat found a passion and commitment to build solutions ""for nurses WITH nurses"" in the technology spaces that have currently only created solutions for providers. They recognized the impact of care to patients from the clinical nurse perspective and that nursing workflows are remarkably different from providers but critically important. Dayna's 20-year background in quality, professional development, and work engagement research is a compass to creating the solutions nurses need, with them in the driver's seat, contributing their expertise and workflow needs and preferences. 

As a team Meru firmly believes that every nurse should have access to the technology resources to make the care they deliver and document feel as seamless as possible so the focus remains on the dynamic care relationship.

The OR Call Scheduler: James Nideffer

 

Call Staff Scheduler is a powerful, web-based solution designed to streamline the management of operating room (OR) call schedules. Ideal for OR managers still relying on pencil-and-paper methods or Excel spreadsheets, this software simplifies the entire scheduling process—allowing custom call schedules to be created in minutes and accessed from any mobile device or computer.

With Call Staff Scheduler, shift trades between staff members are easily managed and tracked, reducing administrative workload while ensuring continuous shift coverage. Staff can sign up for call shifts from any device, or managers can assign shifts as needed. The platform also enables staff to make their call shifts available for others, with real-time trade notifications to maintain accountability.

Key features include automated reminder notifications via text or email the day before a call shift, customizable scheduling options to fit the needs of any OR, and the ability to manage unlimited call calendars and staff members. Since there’s no app to download, the software works seamlessly on all browsers.

For added convenience, front desk staff can print call sheets with shift and contact information for nursing supervisors or others needing to reach on-call staff. Call Staff Scheduler significantly reduces the time and effort required to manage OR schedules, ensuring efficiency, flexibility, and reliable coverage.

vCare Companion: Rachel West MHA, MSN, RN

Rachel West is a distinguished healthcare leader, educator, and innovator with over 20 years of experience spanning clinical practice, nursing education, and workforce development. As the Vice President of Clinical, Rachel leverages her expertise in curriculum design, technology-driven models, and clinical training to enhance nursing practice and patient care.

Her extensive academic background includes leadership roles at prominent institutions such as the University of Massachusetts Boston and the University of New Mexico, where she directed nursing programs, spearheaded curriculum redesigns, and ensured accreditation compliance. Rachel's commitment to advancing nursing education has led to the development of groundbreaking programs, such as the Accelerated BSN curriculum, which integrates competency-based learning with cutting-edge technology.

In her clinical career, Rachel has practiced critical care, hospice, and medical-surgical nursing, which has given her a comprehensive understanding of diverse healthcare environments. She has taken students to many post-acute care and long-term care settings. Her dedication to improving the nursing workforce is evident in her leadership at a large tech company, where she directed the development of ANCC-accredited continuing education programs and industry-leading retraining initiatives.

Rachel is an accomplished speaker and author known for her presentations on workforce development, leadership, and nursing education innovation. Her work has been recognized at national forums, including Sigma Theta Tau International and the National Forum for Workforce Centers.

A lifelong learner, Rachel holds multiple advanced degrees and certifications, including an MSN/MHA in Nursing Education and Health Administration. She is also a member of numerous professional organizations, such as the Society of Nurse Scientists Innovators Entrepreneurs and Leaders (SONSIEL) and Sigma Theta Tau International.

Rachel's mission is to empower nurses and healthcare organizations through education, innovation, and collaboration, ensuring they are equipped to meet the evolving challenges of modern healthcare.

Crimson Medical Solutions: B. "Caleb" Williams, RN, BA, TCRN

Caleb Williams is a nurse leader and entrepreneur passionate about improving patient care and nursing practice through creative problem-solving in healthcare. With over a decade of experience in critical care and emergency nursing, Caleb has firsthand knowledge of the challenges faced by healthcare providers and sees endless opportunities for meaningful change.

Caleb’s entrepreneurial journey began with Med Content Pros. In this healthcare marketing company, he uses his clinical background to help organizations create compelling, accurate content that connects with patients and providers. He simultaneously designed and pursued licensing opportunities for an innovative device to make opening glass ampoules safer and more efficient for nurses.

As his entrepreneurial journey progressed, Caleb co-founded Care Charts, a startup that developed user-friendly software for real-time resuscitation charting. This role deepened his appreciation for the need for nurse-led innovation and gave him hands-on experience with bringing healthcare technology products to market.

Today, Caleb is the Chief Clinical Officer at Crimson Medical Solutions, where he combines his clinical expertise and innovative mindset to tackle issues like IV line misidentification and IV line management workflow inefficiencies. He leads the charge to get their flagship product, the IV Manager, into the hands of nurses worldwide.

Caleb’s professional focus remains on bridging the gap between frontline nursing practice and innovative solutions that enhance patient care and elevate the nursing profession.

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