Q-rounds co-founder and CEO Dr. Mike Pitt recently joined Erin O'Brien on the No Operating Manual podcast, a show about building healthcare companies when there's no clear path and no one tells you what comes next. The conversation covered the origin of Q-rounds, the data behind it, and the honest reality of building a company in healthcare.
The Question No One Tried to Solve
Every hospital has a question that gets asked every single day: "When will the doctor be here?"
For most families and nurses, there has never been a good way to answer it. Families sit and wait, afraid to leave the room and miss the one conversation that matters most. Nurses skip lunch. The whole day bends around a moment.
Q-rounds started by trying to solve that problem. If Uber can give you real-time updates that your driver is minutes away; Great Clips can tell you you are next to be seen for a haircut; and restaurants can tell you when you are going to be seated; Q-rounds can give families, patients, and care teams the dignity of knowing when to be at rounds. At Q-rounds we call that Time Transparency.
It was built by patients, for patients. But solving the patient's problem is not enough on its own.
The Insights That Make it Work
The reality for Q-rounds is, "if we don't make the doctors' lives better, it won't get used."
A tool that helps families but burdens clinicians dies on the vine. So the question became: what is the case for the clinician to want this too?
The answer turned out to be strong. There is a nearly 40% reduction in medical errors when the nurse joins at rounds, and too often nurses are left out simply because they don't know when rounds are happening. Solve the timing, and the nurse is present, the doctor knows everyone is ready, and the family is there for the conversation instead of hearing it secondhand.
The result is a rare kind of product, one where every user thinks it was built for them. Nurses say, "Where's this been all my life? I get to take my lunch breaks again." Families say, "I didn't have to quit my job to be present for rounds because I was able to be notified through Q-rounds." Doctors say they're getting to see six or seven times as many families in less time.
The Data Shows it Works
Erin's reaction to the numbers on the show was direct: "The data is pretty amazing." Q-rounds drives a 197% increase in family presence, a 215% increase in nurse attendance, and we know there is a 38% reduction in harmful errors when nurses are present at rounds.
What started as an efficiency tool became something bigger. As Erin named it during the conversation, "this is care efficiency that's reducing cost of care."
The long-established, best practice in healthcare, especially in pediatrics, of multidisciplinary family-centered rounding is accomplished less than 5% of the time, because coordinating all of those people in one place at one moment is nearly impossible. Q-rounds exists to close that gap.
Be Married to the Problem, Not the Solution
When Erin asked what advice Mike would give other founders, his answer was clear: be married to the problem, not your solution.
You can tell the difference between a company committed to solving a problem and one that simply has an idea for a technology it is sure will work. Founders who stay committed enough to the problem that they would throw out their original idea to get closer to solving it are the ones who tend to make it.
Watch the full conversation
Watch Dr. Mike Pitt on the No Operating Manual podcast with Erin O'Brien:
