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Most people who build healthcare technology companies have left clinical medicine behind. They speak about the industry from a distance, informed, but no longer inside it.
I am still inside it.
I still round on patients. I still work hospital medicine shifts. I still sit in the break room, talk to nurses, and feel the weight of what it means when a shift goes uncovered or a team is stretched too thin. I have not left the bedside to build Shiftolic. I am building Shiftolic because I am still at the bedside, and I can see exactly what is broken from here.
What You See When You're Still in the Room
There is something that happens when you practice medicine across different hospitals and health systems. Patterns emerge. Not clinical patterns, systemic ones.
You start to notice that the administrative friction surrounding patient care is often just as exhausting as the care itself. Scheduling chaos. Coverage gaps that take hours to fill. Physicians who want to pick up extra shifts but have no easy way to find them. Administrators doing heroic work with tools that were never designed for what they're being asked to do.
I have seen medical directors make six phone calls in a row trying to find last-minute coverage. I have been in group chats where administrators blast a WhatsApp message to thirty physicians hoping someone — anyone — is free. I have watched shift swaps get negotiated over text messages, availability tracked on a whiteboard in a back office, and coverage decisions made based entirely on who happened to pick up the phone.
And then winter surge season arrives. Flu season spikes. A facility loses two physicians to illness in the same week. And suddenly the phone calls become frantic, the WhatsApp messages go unanswered, and the whiteboard cannot hold everything that needs to be tracked. We saw the extreme version of this during COVID — when hospitals across the country faced simultaneous, unprecedented staffing emergencies with no infrastructure to respond at speed. Systems that were already fragile snapped under the pressure. Administrators were making dozens of calls a day. Physicians were being reached out to through every personal channel imaginable. The absence of a real platform had never felt more dangerous.
That is not a staffing problem. That is an infrastructure problem. And infrastructure problems do not fix themselves.
None of this is the fault of the hospitals. None of it reflects a failure of the physicians or the administrators working inside them. It is a systems problem — a structural gap in how healthcare facilities and available physicians connect with each other.
And systems problems, unlike clinical ones, do not resolve on their own. Someone has to build the fix.
Why a Physician Builds This — Not Just a Technologist
I have an MBA from McCombs and an MPH from Harvard. I understand markets, operations, and population health. But the reason I am building Shiftolic is not because of what I learned in those programs, it is because of what I have seen as a clinician that those programs helped me articulate.
The physician staffing system in America has a connection problem. On one side, you have facilities, community hospitals, rural health systems, surgical centers, with open shifts they need filled. On the other side, you have credentialed physicians willing to work flexible, extra, or locum assignments. Between them sits an outdated, fragmented process involving staffing agencies, phone calls, spreadsheets, and weeks of credentialing delays.
The result is not just an operational inconvenience. It is a patient care problem.
When a rural hospital cannot fill a hospitalist shift, patients in that community feel it. When a physician burns out not from the medicine but from the administrative chaos surrounding it, the system loses a resource it cannot easily replace. When facilities pay 20 to 40 percent markups to staffing agencies for coverage that a direct marketplace could provide in minutes, that cost eventually lands somewhere. It always does.
I see this not as a business opportunity first. I see it as a problem that needs solving for the patients and communities at the end of every unfilled shift.
Dear Fellow Physicians: You Deserve Better Tools
I want to speak directly to the doctors reading this, the hospitalists, the emergency physicians, the specialists considering locum work, the physicians who want one extra shift a month or a full flexible schedule and have no good way to find either.
You have been underserved by the staffing infrastructure around you for a long time.
Your schedule flexibility has been mediated by agencies that take a significant cut of your rate. Your ability to find coverage opportunities has depended on who you know and which group texts you happen to be in. Your credentialing has been redone from scratch at every new facility, as if the work you already did did not count.
This is not how a profession that requires years of training and carries the weight it carries should operate.
Shiftolic is being built to give you something you have never had — a direct, intelligent, physician-first marketplace where you see open shifts that match your specialty, your availability, and your preferences. Where your credentials travel with you. Where you choose, not an agency.
Medicine on your terms. Shifts when you want them.
Why Rural and Underserved Communities Are at the Center of This
One of the places physician staffing failure hits hardest is in rural and underserved communities. Recruiting permanent physicians to remote locations is difficult. When a gap opens — a retirement, an illness, a resignation, the community feels it immediately. Patients drive hours for care they should be able to access locally. Emergency departments operate at reduced capacity. Continuity of care breaks down.
Physician shift marketplaces can change this. A platform that connects rural facilities with physicians willing to work temporary or locum assignments — removing the friction, the credentialing delays, the agency dependency — can help these communities maintain access to care that their patients depend on.
This is the part of Shiftolic's mission that I feel most personally. Because I have seen those communities. I have cared for those patients. And I believe they deserve a staffing system that works as hard for them as their physicians do.
What We Are Building
Shiftolic is an AI physician shift marketplace — and we are building it from the inside out.
We are building it with the credentialing infrastructure that makes trust between physicians and facilities possible at scale. With the AI matching that learns what shifts work for each physician and surfaces the right opportunities at the right time. With the Workforce Account that gives facility administrators a single place to manage open shifts, internal physician pools, scheduling, and coverage — whether they need outside physicians or simply want better tools for their own team.
We just launched the facility side of the platform. Physicians are already live. And we are only getting started.
The Most Important Shift
I want to close with something simple.
I am a physician. I trained to take care of patients. That has not changed. But I also believe that one of the most meaningful things a clinician can do — if they have the tools and the perspective to do it — is fix the systems that make care harder to deliver.
Every shift that goes unfilled is a patient whose care is delayed or a physician who absorbs a burden they should not have to carry alone. Every rural facility that loses coverage is a community that loses something it may not get back easily.
Shiftolic is my answer to that problem. Not from the outside looking in, but from exactly where I have always been.
Still in the room. Still in the work. Building something that makes both better.
Shiftolic is an AI physician shift marketplace connecting credentialed physicians with hospitals, health systems, and healthcare facilities. Sign up as a physician at shiftolic.com or reach out to yomiajala@shiftolic.com to learn about the Workforce Account for facilities.
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