Build a product that's working

Trust is a vital component of any marketplace, especially where workers perform critical and life-saving work. Our workplace customers (e.g., care facilities, hospitals, dentist’s offices) want reassurance that Clipboard Health workers will show up on time and warning if they are late. Our workplaces also know that no one is perfect – workers get stuck in traffic, cars break down, or drivers can get lost finding a workplace.

We handle a large support volume daily to answer the question: “Will my nurse show up on time?”. Our Worker ETA features give workplaces accurate arrival estimates for Clipboard Health workers by leveraging device location and mapping data. Workplaces can see when their workers are on the way and accurately plan for their arrival. In addition, we have to account for inconsistent location data. Workers can lose connection, close their apps, or turn off their devices. We aim to provide ETAs while asking for the minimum required data.

Today, Worker ETA helps our workplace customers better plan for their patient’s care and ensure fully-staffed workplaces. We continue to improve the accuracy and reliability of our location data while providing location services for other teams and for new features to build upon.

Healthcare facilities rely on Clipboard Health to staff healthcare professionals so their patients are cared for. One of the most challenging experiences for our workplace customers is a last-minute cancellation from a worker they rely on. Unfortunately, this is an industry-wide problem. Last-minute cancellations, or “call-offs” in industry-speak, are an expected cost of doing business with staffing agencies. At Clipboard Health, we are changing this. Urgent Shifts are our “last line of defense” for such cancellations.

When a last-minute cancellation occurs, in seconds, we notify qualified nearby Clipboard Health workers who are within travel distance of the workplace, offering special incentives to those who book the shift. Once booked, we inform the workplace about the switch. Doing this requires accurately and performantly notifying relevant workers – considering device locations, estimated travel times, and worker qualifications. In an industry that averages 60% reliability in filling shifts, Clipboard Health has over 90% reliability in many markets.

90% is good, but we continue to improve Urgent Shifts while building new features to establish ourselves as the most reliable staffing platform in the industry.

Our marketplace experienced 5x growth in 2021 and 4x more in 2022. While trying to keep up with rapidly increasing usage, we saw performance degradation and production outages with our monolith’s MongoDB. In response, we organized an application stability group to dive deep into database performance – analyzing database logs, building production-like data sets for testing, and identifying performance bottlenecks. In addition to solving our immediate stability concerns, we improved the performance of many endpoints and wrote database performance guides for the engineering team.

Today, developers working on our backend treat database monitoring and performance as a first-class concern as we continue to scale our marketplace.

Our monolith’s weekly release process was not keeping up with our rapidly scaling team and marketplace (5x growth in 2021 and 4x more in 2022). Our weekly releases were time-consuming, review-heavy (both manual testing and product manager reviews), and prone to delays. At Clipboard Health, we look for ways to improve both quality and speed.

With continuous deployments, we set out to remove friction by retiring our weekly release process and empowering developers to release their code to production when it’s ready. To do this safely, we improved our end-to-end test coverage, built libraries to reduce the API testing effort, and created production-like test environments to allow developers to verify their changes.

We now deploy our code to production multiple times daily, and developers have complete ownership over the release process. We continue to invest in making releases faster, safer, and more manageable.