RIT students build platform to revolutionize healthcare staffing

Second-year marketing student Joshua Michaels saw firsthand the struggles his mother had in the healthcare industry back in 2019.

Working at a Fairport, N.Y., nursing home where his mom worked, the precocious teenager witnessed his mother, a staffing coordinator and a 20-year veteran in the healthcare industry, struggle to find quality nurses for work shifts.

“Staffing coordinators are like magicians,” Michaels said. “You pull nurses from out of thin air. My mom was always working, whether it was at birthday parties or during her vacations.”

Buoyed by this experience, Michaels created OnCall, an Uber-like healthcare platform designed to combat this issue by connecting available nurses to nearby healthcare facilities.

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Photo courtesy of Liam Welsh.

From left, the OnCall team of second-year students Joshua Michaels, (marketing); Nemesis Velasquez (new media interactive development), Emmanuel Boakye (individualized studies), and Chad Chapman (computer science) pose with Susan Ramsey, middle, and James Ramsey ’86 (accounting) during a presentation over the summer.

His team, consisting of fellow second-year students Chad Chapman, computer science; Emmanuel Boakye, individualized studies and software engineering; and Nemesis Velasquez, new media interactive development, are the first to earn the Ramsey Family Innovation Award, which will provide annual support for one student team each year enrolled in the RIT Student Accelerator program.

James (Jim) Ramsey ’86 (Accounting) is a longtime donor of RIT, previously serving on RIT advisory boards in Saunders College of Business and the College of Health Sciences and Technology. He currently serves as an innovation coach at the Simone Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, while also teaching a graduate study abroad course at RIT on comparative health systems and innovation.

He and his wife, Susan, established the award in memory of their late daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Ramsey, an emerging entrepreneur in the international marketing and advertising world who died in 2013 at the age of 23. Her vision lives on through The Sarah Ramsey Strong Fund, a non-profit created in 2014 to invest in student programs that foster an environment of innovation, creativity, and collaboration. The Ramsey Family Innovation Fund, created on the 10th anniversary of Sarah’s passing, looks to inspire students to apply their creativity and innovation toward making an impact on the world just as Sarah did.

“The timing was right for us,” Susan Ramsey said. “What we’re about is innovation, specifically how to help students with what they need to take their great ideas to the next level as a startup. The world needs these students to come up with impactful ideas and execute them so that we can address some of the biggest problems facing our society.”

In addition to a financial award, the Ramseys plan to continue to stay connected to the OnCall quartet in growth and development of this startup, providing a network of industry-specific innovation advisors who may serve as mentors.

Michaels knew he had a great idea on his hands, he just needed the team. Chapman, a back-end developer, was a fellow high school classmate who supported the idea early. Michaels met Boakye at RIT in a Leadership Academy program, and this jack-of-all-trades became a front-end developer. Sitting in a creative writing class, Michaels then met Velasquez, who became the team’s UX/UI designer.

During his time in the Applied Entrepreneurship course, Michaels and his team worked extensively to refine their OnCall platform by conducting interviews with healthcare professionals. From these interviews, they identified key issues in the healthcare industry, particularly nurse burnout, a lack of appreciation, and inefficient nurse utilization.

OnCall aims to address these issues by providing a platform where nurses can explore different types of work environments without committing to full-time positions, thus alleviating burnout and offering more flexibility. Additionally, OnCall helps healthcare facilities meet staffing demands by allowing them to hire qualified nurses on a flexible, as-needed basis, reducing burnout and improving patient care.

After completing the course, the team joined the Student Accelerator program, an intense experience that honed Michaels' leadership and communication skills. The team impressed evaluators through the program and became the first Ramsey award winners.

“It’s a blessing to receive this award from them,” Michaels said. “It’s weird, but I’ve felt this connection with James and Susan because the idea for the award came from the experiences of their daughter, and the idea of OnCall came from the experiences of my mother. So, it’s like this notion of uniting and uplifting our families to bring us together.”