The Profile / Healthtech
Ilana Borkenstein
She named her company after the hospital floor she worked nights on. Then she set out to fix the schedule that runs it.
The CEO still keeps the night shift in mind.
She named her company after the hospital floor she worked nights on. Then she set out to fix the schedule that runs it.
The CEO still keeps the night shift in mind.
There is a floor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center called M7. It was a bone marrow transplant unit, and then, almost overnight, it became a COVID-19 ward. Ilana Borkenstein worked it as a registered nurse. Years later, when she needed a name for the company she was building, she did not reach for a thesaurus or a brand consultant. She reached for the floor.
M7 Health is that company - a New York healthtech firm building staffing and scheduling software for the people who hold hospitals together. It is used every day by tens of thousands of clinicians across more than 60 hospitals in 29 states. Borkenstein is its co-founder and CEO, and her resume reads like a deliberate march back toward the bedside: nursing degree from Penn, a stint consulting at Deloitte, the night shift at Sloan Kettering, operating roles at two early-stage health startups, then an MBA from Harvard.
Most founders pitch disruption. Borkenstein pitches a fairer schedule. Her argument is quietly radical for an industry that loves a dashboard: staffing is not a math problem. It is a human one. A nurse with a sick kid, a preference for nights, a limit to how many doubles a body can take - none of that lives in a spreadsheet, and all of it decides whether that nurse stays or walks.
Source: M7 Health customer results, Series A announcement. Bars scaled for illustration.
M7 is a hospital unit number. Most startups name themselves after an aspiration. She named hers after a place where she carried a pager and a patient load.
Her core bet is that scheduling fails when it treats nurses as interchangeable units. Preference and sentiment, she argues, are the variables that decide retention.
She met co-founder Eric Gruskin in a startup operations class at HBS. The project they built together turned into a real company about three years later.
Roughly a quarter of M7's employees are nurses. They know what a broken schedule and an inefficient system feel like because they lived it.
Threshold Ventures, First Round Capital, Lakehouse and 25m Health bet that the fix for nurse turnover is better job design, not more contract labor.
Her north star: make the profession more sustainable for the people in it and more attractive to the people thinking about it.
During college she spent a summer doing public health work in Kenya. Two babies there were named after her.
She went from consulting at Deloitte to the bedside, then to building software for the bedside - the rare founder who took the pay cut into a profession before disrupting it.
The unit that named the company converted from bone marrow transplant care to a COVID-19 ward while she worked it.
She was named a Blavatnik Fellow at Harvard Business School, a program for entrepreneurs commercializing real ventures.