When I started Atlas Mobility, the business looked very different from what it is today. What has remained consistent is the problem we are trying to solve: helping organizations create safer environments for their workforces while improving the experience and outcomes for the people they serve.
My perspective on that problem was shaped well before Atlas. Before entering healthcare, I spent years in the firefighting world, where workforce safety is fundamental to how teams operate. Firefighters work in environments where physical demands, risk and teamwork are part of the job, and where having the right processes and support can make a meaningful difference.
Moving into healthcare, I recognized a similar challenge. Nurses and other care team members face significant physical demands as part of providing patient care, particularly when moving and repositioning patients. The industries are very different, yet the underlying workforce safety challenge has some important parallels.
Since then, I have dedicated my career to helping hospitals address this challenge in ways that support both caregivers and patients.
Starting With the Problem
Our initial offering focused on providing hands-on support to healthcare organizations. We worked directly with hospital teams to help them establish safer mobility practices and integrate them into daily operations.
Spending more time in hospitals gave us a much clearer view of what care teams needed beyond the service itself. One of the clearest lessons was the need for greater visibility into what was happening with patient mobility.
Hospitals needed a way to understand whether mobility practices were being followed, identify where additional support was needed and make mobility more actionable for care teams. We also saw the importance of understanding whether interventions were happening with the right frequency and quality to achieve their intended effect.
Those observations led us to develop the Mobility Monitoring System.
The system was designed to supplement the people doing the work. Technology could provide information and visibility into mobility activity while continuing to rely on the expertise and judgment of the people at the bedside.
The combination of people, technology and data became a much stronger approach than any one of those elements could provide on its own.
Letting Experience Shape the Product
The evolution of Atlas changed how I think about building a business.
Our original offering gave us a close view of what was happening at the bedside. That experience became an important source of product insight because we were developing technology alongside healthcare organizations and seeing firsthand where processes worked, where they broke down and what care teams needed to make safer mobility part of their daily workflow.
Customer feedback continued to shape the direction of the business. As hospitals began using the Mobility Monitoring System, we gained a better understanding of the different ways organizations wanted to approach mobility monitoring and the resources available to them.
Hospitals vary considerably in size, resources and infrastructure. A solution that works well for a large health system may require a different approach for a smaller or critical access hospital. Smaller organizations can face many of the same workforce and patient care challenges while operating with fewer resources.
Those differences led to another evolution: AtlasONE, an all-in-one implementation tool designed to give hospitals the resources and expertise they need to establish effective mobility programs independently.
AtlasONE brings together the tools, guidance and expertise needed to build and support a structured program. Hospitals can take ownership of implementation while using our framework and expertise to guide their efforts.
For critical access hospitals and other organizations with limited resources, this approach can provide a more accessible way to establish a structured program while benefiting from the expertise we have developed through years of working with healthcare organizations.
Evolving Alongside the Customer
Looking back at the evolution of Atlas, I see a progression based on what we were learning from healthcare organizations. We started with a service because hands-on support was the right approach for the problem we understood at the time. Working alongside care teams helped us see the value of monitoring and the role technology could play in supporting their work, while continued conversations with customers showed us the need for different ways to access our expertise and capabilities.
Each stage has built on the experience that came before it. For me, sustainable business growth comes from staying close to the problem you are solving while remaining open to better ways of solving it.
Customer feedback can reveal opportunities that are difficult to see from inside a boardroom or through market research alone. When similar needs emerge across conversations, they can point toward an opportunity to evolve the business while building on the expertise and capabilities already in place.
That approach has allowed Atlas to grow while remaining focused on the needs of healthcare organizations. As those needs continue to change, I expect our business to evolve alongside them.
