Shift handoff - the moment when one nurse hands a patient over to the next - is one of the most safety-critical transitions in a hospital. It happens at the end of every shift, often in a chaotic environment, and it has always depended heavily on individual memory, habit, and whatever notes a nurse had time to write down.
Levi Knudson, the founder of ShiftGuard, spent 15 years as a registered nurse, most of them in the ER, watching this same vulnerability repeat itself shift after shift. He knew the problem wasn't nurse competence or lack of care. It was a workflow gap, and he decided to build the tool that could close it.
He brought the idea to Intersog. Together, we took that clinical insight and turned it into ShiftGuard: a lightweight, HIPAA-aware handoff assistant designed to help nurses structure and deliver consistent, reliable patient reports, without adding complexity, documentation overhead, or integration requirements that slow down hospital adoption.
In theory, shift handoff should be straightforward. In practice, it's one of the most interruption-heavy moments of the day. Call lights are going off, new patients are arriving, family members have questions, and the outgoing nurse is trying to wrap up tasks while verbally passing the patient story to a colleague who's just walked in the door.
The EMR holds a lot of information — but it was never designed to serve as a real-time handoff assistant. Getting from a full patient chart to a concise, prioritized verbal report still requires a nurse to decide what matters most, organize it quickly, and communicate it clearly under pressure. That gap between documentation and communication is where critical details get lost.
“We keep expecting nurses to carry all of this in their head during one of the busiest moments of the shift. That felt broken to me. I wanted to build something that supported the nurse in real time instead of adding another burden.” — Levi Knudson, Founder, ShiftGuard
The product vision was clear. The build challenges were real:
ShiftGuard is a structured handoff app built around how nurses already think and communicate. Rather than replacing the EMR or adding another documentation layer, it supports one specific moment: the verbal patient handoff at shift change.
A nurse opens ShiftGuard, sets up their patients, and uses the tool to organize the patient story around key clinical categories — status, risks, pending items, medications, plan of care, and follow-up needs. The receiving nurse gets a clearer, more consistent report. The handoff is more reliable. The nurse spends less time chasing clarification.
The collaboration was iterative throughout. Levi brought the nursing perspective and real-world feedback from using the product as a clinician. The Intersog team translated that into the app experience — reviewing features, testing workflow, identifying friction, and refining until the product matched how nurses actually move through a shift.
The best fit for ShiftGuard today is inpatient units with structured, repeatable handoff workflows: med-surg, telemetry, ICU step-down, observation, behavioural health, and rehabilitation. These are the environments where communication gaps are most consequential and where a consistent report structure can make a measurable difference.
ShiftGuard is now at the MVP and early demonstration stage - a working product that can be shown, tested, and evaluated in a real clinical environment. For an early-stage healthcare product built by a solo founder with a clinical background (not a software background), that's the result that matters most.
Early conversations with nurses and hospital leaders have been encouraging. The problem resonates immediately with people who understand handoff risk. The feedback has been consistent: the tool needs to stay fast, simple, and genuinely useful inside a real workflow, and it does.
The planned pilot metrics reflect what early adoption in healthcare actually looks like: nurse usability, perceived handoff completeness, confidence in receiving report, missed follow-up items, time spent preparing and clarifying report, and overall workflow fit. The goal is to demonstrate that a structured handoff assistant reduces communication gaps, improves nurse efficiency, and supports better patient-safety outcomes before expanding further.
"A successful deployment means nurses actually use the tool because it makes handoff easier and more reliable. For a hospital, winning would look like more consistent reports, fewer missed handoff elements, less time spent chasing clarification after shift change, and greater nurse confidence during transitions of care.” — Levi Knudson, Founder, ShiftGuard
The immediate priority is getting ShiftGuard in front of hospital quality and nursing leaders and moving into structured pilot programs. The first unit to run a pilot will help validate the product against real workflow and produce the measurable data that healthcare adoption decisions are built on.
Looking further ahead, the same handoff-reliability model could apply to other high-risk communication points across the hospital: ER-to-floor handoffs, transfer reports, discharge readiness communication, break coverage, and charge nurse updates. The foundation that's been built is designed to grow with the clinical problem.
Hospitals curious about ShiftGuard can explore a demo and discuss pilot opportunities at shiftguard.info.
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