ShadowNurse Puts People Back at the Center of Healthcare

Co-founders Olivia Svrchek and Jeff Pollard talk about bridging the gaps between hospital and home.

In healthcare, the most vulnerable moments often happen outside the hospital walls. After a doctor’s visit or a hospital discharge, patients and their families are often left to navigate confusing instructions, complex symptoms, and life-changing diagnoses, largely on their own left at sea to navigate their own healthcare journey.

ShadowNurse was created to change that.

Co-Founders Olivia Svrchek, a nurse and nurse practitioner, and Jeff Pollard, a physician and surgeon, understood for a long time that there were big gaps in the current system that left patients and their caregivers feeling alone and vulnerable. They made these realizations separately, but it nagged at each of them. 

"I think from day one (as a nurse) you could see that there were so many better ways to do things, and nurses on the unit were typically going above and beyond to fill these gaps you could see," said Olivia. 

Nurses were often the ones greeting patients and their families when they arrived and the nurses were there when they were discharged. 

"We could see their struggles and know what they were going to face when they got home, and all the issues they'd have to handle without a lot of support," said Olivia.

Most nurses and doctors know that once a patient leaves a care setting, they're often on their own.

Pocket Nurse

Nurses’ and doctors’ concerns about caring for the patients didn't stop just because their patients were discharged. 

"I mean, sometimes even after discharge, we'd call them to check in or share our personal numbers so if they had questions, they had someone to call," said Olivia.

The calls were not about diagnosis or treatment. Instead nurses did what nurses do: they helped people and ensured they felt cared for.

"So it started there," said Olivia. "I started talking about this idea of a "pocket nurse" in 2015. Basically, access to a nurse that you'd have in your back pocket, even after a hospital discharge. I talked to a few people about it, and then when I was working at 23andMe with Jeff, I mentioned it to him."

Olivia's idea resonated with Jeff, who had been ruminating about the issue of direct care for a long time.

"For anybody who is helping patients, and particularly if they're directly in your care, you wonder what happens once they go home," said Jeff. "Will they get better, or worse? Will they follow directions or did they understand the directions?" 

It wasn’t just that. Jeff worried that all the tremendous innovation in healthcare had the consequence of distancing doctors and nurses from their patients. Several years ago he wrote an essay about how electronic health records offered tremendous opportunities, but they also created this new phenomena during a doctor’s visit. Instead of sitting facing their patient and providing hands-on care, doctors were often sitting facing their computers with their hands on a keyboard entering information the patient was giving to them.

“These are often short visits and doctors were, in a manner of speaking, taking their hands off their patients and putting them on the keyboard,” said Jeff. “I thought we needed to do more to preserve the human connection in care.”

Care in the In-Between

Both Olivia and Jeff had long careers working in hospitals and clinics and then time at health tech companies in Silicon Valley. They each saw the same something similar, patients often left to figure it all out on their own.

"The system provides care at these intervals, but what about all the spaces in between?" said Jeff.

“Those transitional moments—recovering after surgery, managing new medications, or learning to care for an elderly parent—are when people often feel most alone.”

Both Jeff and Olivia said there typically isn't a continuum of care for people that extends beyond an office visit, however short that might be, or after a hospital discharge. At so many critical life moments — a pregnancy, a cancer diagnosis, or caring for an elderly parent — you are alone.

"That's where this idea of 'interstitial care' came from,” said Jeff. “Olivia and I were talking, and she was explaining the pocket nurse idea, and it circled back to this idea of providing that important human support for the care in the in-between."

In a way, both Olivia and Jeff were already doing that, but it was for their own family and friends. 

Jeff's kids, spouse, parents, brothers, sisters, and coworkers knew they could call or text him if they had a question about treatment or symptoms.

In much the same way, Olivia became her family's "pocket nurse," helping with her mother’s care or answering her sister’s questions.

They were both providing on-demand, empathetic, and human care.

They wondered, what if they could do something like this but for everybody who needed it.

ShadowNurse, Empathetic Care at Scale

Olivia and Jeff built ShadowNurse to provide interstitial care, human support between official points of care. Patients, their families or caregivers can connect with a licensed nurse through ShadowNurse’s secure platform to ask questions, review instructions, or simply feel reassured that someone is there when they need it.

“I would consider it a success if people felt that they were not alone and that they were supported because of what we do,” said Olivia.

It may be a “soft metric” but the need for support isn’t just anecdotal. Studies show that patients who receive follow-up guidance after discharge have fewer complications, lower readmission rates, and better long-term outcomes. But as Olivia notes, that core success metric is deeply human.

“It's not like doctors and nurses don't want to care for their patients,” Jeff said. “They're just stretched thin, and projections are that that problem will be worse. What we’re doing with ShadowNurse isn’t some massive technological innovation or new treatment or anything like that. It's just getting back to care, and we think we can do that at scale.”

How ShadowNurse Works

On-demand access: Patients and caregivers connect to nurses via a secure mobile app or phone line.

Trusted professionals: ShadowNurse team members are experienced registered nurses, trained in patient navigation, empathetic communication, and technologies, as well as expertise in specific healthcare domains.

Continuity of care: ShadowNurse works alongside existing doctors and health systems, ensuring caregivers and families don’t have to figure things out on their own.

Scalable model: By operating outside the constraints of short office visits, ShadowNurse can support people across conditions,—from new parents to cancer patients to those caring for aging relatives.

Olivia Svrchek, FNP, MS, Co-Founder of ShadowNurse, is a nursing executive and nurse practitioner who earned her nursing degree from Johns Hopkins University. She has served as an Assistant Nurse Manager at Stanford Health Care, Medical Affairs Manager at 23andMe, Senior Clinical Research Nurse in Oncology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and most recently as Clinic Director for a concierge medical service. She is passionate about building novel remote working solutions for nurses that scale to help as many patients as possible.

Jeffrey Pollard, MD, Co-Founder of ShadowNurse, is a physician-surgeon who earned his MD from Vanderbilt and completed residencies at Stanford and Tulane. After establishing his own practice, he transitioned to health tech leadership in Silicon Valley, serving as Head of Medical Affairs at 23andMe, Senior Vice President of Medical Affairs at Cognoa, and Chief Medical Officer at Empathy Encoded.