Health Tech Idaho’s Monthly Innovator Feature
NexGen Clinical Education
Welcome to Health Tech Idaho’s new monthly feature, 5 Questions With…!
In this monthly feature we will have 5 short and snappy questions to quickly get to know an innovator who is changing the face of healthcare and technology in Idaho.
This month’s innovator is Jade Chase at NexGen Clinical Education. A sixth generation Idahoan, Jade started his career working as an actuary when he realized he wanted more fulfillment and purpose. He transitioned into healthcare as a nurse in the Air Force and then at St. Lukes. While he knew he found his calling at the bedside with patients, he also experienced significant gaps in clinical nursing education and development. That’s when he caught the entrepreneur bug. We’ll let the 5 questions tell you the rest of the story.
What’s your current gig?
I am the Co-Founder and CEO at NexGen Clinical Education. My co-founder Lloyd McCluskey and I started the company in 2017 to solve a major problem we experienced as nurses: clinical education and training. Believe it or not, you don’t learn everything that you need to know about being a clinical nurse in nursing school. There is so much on the job learning that happens and the stakes are very high. As a new nurse this is incredibly stressful, and as a more experienced nurse you’re spending a lot of your time helping train and coach the new nurses. This all takes away from patient care and leads to huge burnout and turnover problems among nurses. I had seen this problem enough that I knew there had to be a way to use technology to solve it. This is why we created NexGen.
What’s your elevator pitch and how do you deliver on it?
We help nurses become experienced faster by providing them with a trusted, reliable resource for clinical care that’s always at their fingertips.
We deliver on this promise with our plusRN mobile app. Nurses can assess clinical findings to better analyze and generate diagnoses and care plans, improve common bedside skills they may not have experience with, and use our script to help guide their communications and charting. All of our content is created by seasoned nurses who have years of clinical experience.
What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned getting to this point?
As an entrepreneur, you just can’t give up. You just can’t. You’re going to want to, maybe multiple times some days. Yes, there will be roadblocks beyond your control. It will take three times as long and three times as much money as you think it will to bring a decent product to market. But keep going because anything can change at any minute. Think about your end users. For me, I think about my experiences as a new nurse white knuckling the steering wheel of my car after a shift because I had so much stress pent up inside me. I think about the patients who aren’t getting the care they deserve because we aren’t equipping our nurses with the tools they need to be successful. We’ve grown to more than 1,000 downloads of our app, and that’s 1,000 nurses who we are helping to deliver better patient care and have a more satisfying career. These are the reasons why I’ll never surrender.
If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about healthcare right now, what would change?
Solve the nursing shortage! Nurses truly are the lifeblood of patient care and we’ve got both experienced nurses and new nurses alike leaving the field. This greatly impacts the quality of our healthcare and costs the system millions of dollars every year, which in turn makes our healthcare more expensive. We need nurses at the bedside for a career, not just a year.
Why are you excited about healthtech in Idaho?
We have a growing and aging population in Idaho, and to keep this community as special as it is we must provide the best care possible for everyone. Technology plays a huge part in helping us do that efficiently. I see an ecosystem being built right now of Idaho founders and investors who want to solve the problems facing the healthcare industry. We can rely on each other and help each other’s success. I really see a sum net positive of all of us coming together to solve these problems and am very optimistic about the future.
Want to meet Jade and other innovators like him in person? Be sure to attend Health Tech Idaho’s Quarterly Event on June 28 at St. Alphonsus. Register here.
And if you’re interested in connecting with Jade to support the work of NexGen Clinical Education as an investor or user, reach out to him at jade@nexgenclinicaleducation.com.
