A publicly traded Dallas-area operator of senior living communities and assisted living centers has adopted San Antonio-based company Stogo LLC’s workforce management software, helping expand the local company’s national profile. Capital Senior Living — which announced a name change Nov. 3 and formally rebranded as Sonida Senior Living on Monday — operates more than 70 senior living facilities in 19 states.
Jeremy Falke, its senior vice president of human resources, said they began piloting the Stogo software — originally intended for hospital use — in several facilities in 2020, and found it so effective that they asked the company’s founders to work alongside them in adapting the health care staffing software for use in senior living facilities. “It puts employees’ schedules in their pockets and on their phone in a really … simple and beautiful way,” Falke said, and it’s helped Sonida cut down on overtime hours and use of outside agencies.
“I don’t know what we’d do without it, in this labor environment.” San Antonians Heather Anderson and Patrick Halinski founded Stogo in June 2017 to create technology that would enable hospitals to fill unstaffed shifts in a more efficient way. Stogo is currently used in numerous hospitals and health care facilities across the country to fill increased staffing needs during the Covid-19 pandemic. Typically, hospitals and other health care facilities rely on phone calls and texts to other staff members within their company to fill shifts, or else turn to outside agencies.
“What we saw is that leaders spent up to three hours a day trying to fill holes in a shift,” Anderson said. “What the leaders don’t have readily available is access to every possible resource that could fill that shift. We’ve filled 75,000 shifts since September 2018.” Available to hospitals and health care facilities on both Android and iOS, Stogo manages and gathers all the data of available employees within a hospital or health care system, and offers open shifts to employees who can accept or decline a shift with just one click. This cuts down the time that shift leaders must spend to fill empty shifts by 50%, Halinski said. “Our return on the investment is time savings,” Anderson said.
“It’s a soft dollar — it’s someone’s time.” Halinski said that if hospitals use Stogo to fill just four shifts a month without turning to external agencies, it pays for itself, and on average hospitals using the software are filling 400 shifts a month. Pricing in some instances is a flat fee rate and in others a subscription model, depending on the client’s size, needs and specifications. Baptist Health System’s Group Chief Nursing Officer Kristen Lemus said Baptist hospitals have used the online tool to fill open shifts since 2017 and it works well for their needs.
Tim Taylor, founder and chief medical officer of ProScribe LLC, the largest privately held medical scribe company in the country, was a force behind Stogo’s founding as an angel investor and adviser. “When it comes to investing in new companies, they say it’s always better to invest in a person rather than a product,” he said. “Stogo is both.
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