Two Nurses in Arizona Innovating & Helping Hundreds of Patients with Compassionate at Home Care

From Idea to serving 165 patients & generating $1M+ in sales in 18 months!

Growing up, Jasmine Bhatti never thought she would become a nurse, let alone the CEO of a fast-growing healthcare startup.

When Jasmine’s grandmother was diagnosed with cancer and her family became the full-time caregiver, Jasmine firsthand saw the challenges the patients and families had to endure. They had to give her food via tubes, to make sure they are not aggravating the wounds. Jasmine also remembers how overwhelmed she and her family felt while caring for their loved one. When they really needed help, there was no other place to go to, than the emergency room.

Lack of quality care at home coupled with poorly executed hospital discharges leads to avoidable readmissions that cost Medicare alone over 17 billion dollars. 

Lack of quality care at home coupled with poorly executed hospital discharges leads to avoidable readmissions that cost Medicare alone over 17 billion dollars.

This may be in part because the families who are trying to take care of patients after prolonged hospitalization or surgery are unable to do so without any help.

Jasmine’s experience while caring for her grandmother, lead her to become a nurse. As a nurse, she would often get calls in the middle of the night from her patients who were discharged a day earlier and had no clue how to manage and take care of themselves at home. Many of the patients would even offer her money to come home with them.

These experiences gave Jasmine the inspiration and she had an idea to provide companionate, quality care with peace of mind and a sense of security in the patient’s homes. She and her co-founder (another nurse, Ayan Said) kept discussing the idea and the need to do something for the patients.

In January 2020, Jasmine & Ayan had enough. They wanted to get going with their idea and do something about the problems they have seen first-hand.

With a humble beginning of one patient to care for and a small funding award from Arizona State University, Jasmine and Ayan started Navi Nurses.

“Remember, we are nurses, we didn’t have business experience”, said Jasmine with a laugh as she elaborated on their biggest challenge – they didn’t have business skills and connections to the right people who could help.

“Remember, we are nurses, we didn’t have business experience”, said Jasmine with a laugh as she elaborated on their biggest challenge – they didn’t have business skills and connections to the right people who could help.

Jasmine and Navi Nurses got selected by the state-wide Virtual Accelerator program run by Arizona’s premium economic development agency. This accelerator was powered by the StartupWind platform.

During this program, Jasmine and her team developed her idea into a solid business plan and acquired the right business skills to take Navi Nurses to the next level. The program helped them to connect with high-quality mentors, gave them access to high-quality courses, videos and streamlined tools for ideation, market research, prototyping, business model canvas, and business planning.

The StartupWind Innovation platform was amazing as it solved our biggest challenge. It allowed us to acquire the business skills we didn’t have.   — Jasmine Bhatti

“The StartupWind Innovation platform was amazing as it solved our biggest challenge. It allowed us to acquire the business skills we didn’t have. The platform simplified putting together a complicated business idea into a well-formed business plan. The courses and content along with the tools and framework on the platform were invaluable. The ability to connect with a broader pool of mentors and interact with my mentors via StartupWind was super helpful. I was able to develop my venture idea and business plan step-by-step, I could go back and review my work, and my mentor could go back and comment on different stages of my venture — interactive Lean Model Canvas or Business Plan, without us having to meet. StartupWind was a hub where I could not only connect to my assigned mentors but also connect to other mentors with different expertise such as marketing.” , said Jasmine while elaborating how StartupWind and the Virtual Accelerator program changed the game for Navi Nurses.

The ability to connect with a broader pool of mentors and interact with my mentors via StartupWind was super helpful. 

After the program, with newly acquired skills, mentors, and connections, Navi Nurses took off. In just a year and a half, Navi Nurses grew from 2 nurses to 140 contracted nurses and from serving 1 patient to 165 patients and their families by providing compassionate, high-quality health care at home.

Navi Nurses grew from 2 nurses to 140 contracted nurses and from serving 1 patient to 165 patients and their families.

The company also grew dramatically with over $600K revenues in its 1^st year and is on track to grow over $1M in revenues in the 2^nd year.

$600K revenues in 1^st year and is on track to grow $1M+ in 2^nd year.

While scaling their impact, Navi Nurses started focusing on patient-centered care. Each nurse visit is driven by the need the patient has at that moment. Jasmine and her team initially started with patients who had undergone plastic surgery and then expanded to patients with general medical surgical needs to post-cardiac surgery needs.

Over the period, Navi Nurses built a team that has expertise in 15 different disciplines and they are able to match the patient with the right skills that the nurses have. For example, while serving a patient recovering from heart surgery, the main nurse overseeing this patient would be someone who has experience with cardiac care to ensure the best patient outcomes.

Unlike other alternatives, Navi Nurses is able to provide specialized care that patients could only get at the hospitals – in their homes. When the patients go home, the quality, expertise, and specialized care they need at home is not dropped at all.

As part of their growth strategy, Navi Nurses started using technology that allows the nurses to work collaboratively without affecting the patient experience. For example, the morning nurse, using the technology collaborates with the evening nurse and together they provide the best possible patient care and experience.

Jasmine and her team are hungry to make an impact on a significantly larger scale and are planning to assist over 500 patients by end of 2023.

Jasmine and her team are hungry to make an impact on a significantly larger scale and are planning to assist over 500 patients by end of 2023. In order to do that, they are working on building a more sophisticated technology that will leverage AI (Artificial Intelligence), predict the needs of the patients, predict the changes in the required care, improve collaboration between nurses and make the business operations more efficient.

The compassion, creativity, and hustle of two nurses, coupled with business skills they could quickly acquire, tools & frameworks to apply the skills they learned, and the advice they could get from mentors has enabled Navi Nurses to impact 165 patients and their families.

The compassion, creativity, and hustle of two nurses, coupled with business skills they could quickly acquire have enabled Navi Nurses to impact 165 patients and their families.

It has also given them skills to scale the impact to new markets and potentially thousands of patients while leveraging technology to help manage the growth.