The Nurse Entrepreneur Movement Is Real. Now It Needs Infrastructure. (Sponsored)

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When I was helping build NurseGrid back in 2015, I could count on one hand the number of nurses I knew who were running companies. Not because nurses didn’t have ideas, they always have, but because the concept of a nurse as a founder, as a CEO, as someone with a cap table and a pitch deck, felt like it lived in a different world than the one we occupied. Entrepreneurship was something other people did. Doctors maybe. Engineers. People with MBAs.

Nursing had its own version of ambition, and it looked like clinical ladder advancement, a specialty cert, maybe a leadership role if you wanted to go that route. Starting a company wasn’t really part of the conversation.

That has changed dramatically.

My DMs today look nothing like they did ten years ago. Every week, nurses reach out with ideas they’ve been incubating for years: apps, devices, care models, platforms, staffing solutions, diagnostic tools. Nurses who are still working the floor while pitching investors on weekends. Nurses who have left clinical roles to build something they couldn’t stop thinking about. Nurses who are six months into a company and running into walls they didn’t know existed and need someone who has been there to help them think through it.

The energy is undeniable. The American Nurses Association Enterprise Innovation has highlighted more than 300 nurse entrepreneurs actively leading initiatives as agents of change, spanning medical device development, new care delivery models, business creation, and educational innovation. And that’s just the ones being formally tracked. More nurses are exploring entrepreneurship while maintaining their clinical roles, a shift that is reshaping traditional career pathways, especially among nurses newer to the profession, who see entrepreneurship as a way to expand their impact while maintaining flexibility.

This is a movement. What it still lacks, in many cases, is the infrastructure to support it.

The Gap Nobody Talks About

Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough: nurses are already doing the cognitive work of entrepreneurship every single shift. Assessing a situation with incomplete information, making decisions in real time, advocating for something nobody else in the room is willing to fight for, building workarounds when the official process has failed the patient in front of you. That is not so different from what founders do.

What nurses typically don’t have is the network, the vocabulary, or the access that makes the business side of building a company possible. And the market has historically been slow to offer it. There’s a long tradition in healthcare of underestimating what nurses bring to business conversations, comparing them unfavorably to physician founders, assuming that clinical credibility doesn’t translate to commercial instinct. It’s a bias that is both wrong and costly to the industry, because the people who have spent the most time at the bedside are the ones who understand most clearly where the system is broken.

Nurses have a front row seat to healthcare’s biggest unsolved problems. That’s not a soft claim. It’s a structural fact about who delivers the most patient care in this country. And increasingly, nurses aren’t waiting for someone else to build the solution.

The nurse entrepreneur community has always had a capacity for mutual support that is genuinely unusual. Nurses lift each other. They share what they know, connect people across specialties and sectors, and show up for each other in ways that are not always present in startup culture. That instinct is real, and it’s one of the things that makes this particular community so generative when it has the right conditions around it.

What it needs alongside that instinct is real mentorship from people who have actually built and sold in the healthcare market. Honest feedback on whether an idea is a business or a feature. Introductions to investors, buyers, and operators who take nurse founders seriously. And a credentialing path that gives nurse-led products standing when they enter a market that doesn’t always know how to evaluate them.

That’s the gap NurseApproved was designed to close.

NurseApproved is a nurse-led certification and innovation organization built on a straightforward premise: nurses are the most trusted profession in America, the largest workforce in healthcare, and they should be at the center of how healthcare innovation gets evaluated and built.

The core of what we do is independent certification. Companies bring us their products, and we put them in front of a panel of practicing nurse experts through a rigorous evaluation process. The NurseApproved seal goes only to products that meet the panel’s high bar. Some don’t make it. That’s exactly what gives the seal its weight when a product earns it, and it’s why hospital buyers, value-analysis committees, and clinical leaders take it seriously.

Certification is one piece of a larger mission that also spans innovation pavilions at major health conferences, advisory work, and live courses on the business of healthcare taught by nurse founders.

And now there is the Fellowship.

The NurseApproved Fellowship is a six-month program open to any nurse interested in entrepreneurship, whether you have a company in progress, an idea you’ve been sitting on, or you’re just ready to find out what building looks like for you. Applications close October 4. The cohort kicks off the week of October 12.

Fellows receive direct mentorship from nurse operators who have raised, built, and exited. They get free enrollment in the Nurse Entrepreneur Accelerator course, which runs concurrently and covers the fundamentals of building and selling in the healthcare market. And for startups that are ready, there is a path to pursue NurseApproved certification as part of the program.

The Fellowship is led end to end by Claire Hast, who selects the cohort, runs the sessions, and stays invested in founders’ outcomes across the full six months. The program fee is $1,499. Fellows may cancel for a full refund before the cohort begins on October 12. After the program starts, NurseApproved will work with fellows individually on any concerns.

None of this happens without Rebecca Love.

Rebecca has been recognized as the first nurse featured on TED.com. She was recognized by Modern Healthcare as one of the most influential people in healthcare. She founded HireNurses.com, which was acquired in 2018. She launched the Nurse Hackathon, co-founded SONSIEL, and established the Commission for Nurse Reimbursement.

And now she is returning to the thing she has always cared most about: nurses. Specifically, what happens when nurses are given the tools, the network, and the credibility infrastructure to build the things they can see need to be built.

If you are a nurse who has been sitting on an idea, or actively building one and wondering why it’s so hard to get people to take it seriously, you already know why this matters. The profession that delivers most of American healthcare should not be on the outside of the rooms where healthcare gets built. The Fellowship is one concrete way to change that, and Rebecca and the team at NurseApproved are as invested in your outcome as you are.

Applications close October 4. Learn more at NurseApproved.health/fellowship.