At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Atalan co-founders Tiffany Chan and Dr. Sisi Hu were both deeply involved in healthcare workforce initiatives. Sisi had received a National Science Foundation research grant studying the impact of COVID-19 on healthcare workers, while Tiffany was leading a statewide emergency volunteer effort supporting frontline clinicians.
As they compared notes and spoke with health systems across the country, one thing became immediately clear: healthcare organizations were facing a workforce crisis unlike anything they had seen before.
Initially, many conversations focused on physician burnout and workforce instability. Tiffany and Sisi began building what would become healthcare’s leading Clinician Retention Intelligence (CRI) platform to help health systems proactively identify physician burnout, turnover risk, and operational strain before they escalated into larger workforce and patient care challenges. The platform quickly gained traction, with strong demand from health systems seeking better ways to understand and support their clinical workforce.
But by 2023, another theme consistently rose to the surface.
Nurses.
Everywhere they turned, health systems were asking the same question: Can someone finally build something specifically for nurses?
For Tiffany and Sisi, the issue felt both urgent and deeply personal.
As they continued interviewing healthcare leaders, they became increasingly struck by the disconnect between how essential nurses are to patient care and how invisible nursing contributions often are within operational and financial systems.
Nurses touch the patient throughout almost the entire care journey, but so much of their impact is hidden. The more Tiffany and Sisi learned, the clearer the challenge became.
Nurses were experiencing extraordinary levels of stress and turnover, yet many workforce systems were not designed around nursing realities. Existing models often focused on staffing shortages after they occurred, instead of identifying early warning signs before nurses reached a breaking point.
Atalan’s team realized that solving this problem would require more than adapting existing workforce tools. It would require building something entirely new, and building it alongside nurses themselves.
So, Tiffany and Sisi started where they always start: by listening.
They went back to the research process, diving deeply into nursing literature, while conducting extensive interviews with nursing leaders and frontline nurses across health systems. Together, they worked to understand the operational, emotional, and workflow factors most connected to burnout and turnover. They dug into nursing workflows, which are fundamentally different from physician workflows.
Shift structures, documentation demands, patient ratios, scheduling variability, EHR interactions, and operational pressures all shape the nursing experience in ways traditional workforce tools often fail to capture. Existing research in this area was also surprisingly limited. The Atalan team had to help establish new frameworks and new ways of measuring workforce health specific to nursing.
The platform development process became intensely collaborative.
Together with nurses and nursing leaders, the team identified key risk indicators connected to workforce strain and mapped them directly to operational and EHR data. They studied how workload intensity appears in workflows, how scheduling patterns influence wellbeing, and how operational friction accumulates over time.
Every insight was tested against real-world nursing experience.
The goal was never simply to create another dashboard or reporting tool. The goal was to build a platform capable of helping health systems identify early signs of workforce distress before nurses leave, and to turn those insights into meaningful support and action.
That vision continues to shape the platform today.
One of the most exciting aspects of the nursing platform is its ability to facilitate more meaningful conversations between leaders and nurses. Instead of relying on vague check-ins or reactive interventions, organizations can ground discussions in real operational signals and actionable insights.
The platform is designed not only to identify risk but also to help organizations better understand the underlying drivers behind workforce strain, creating opportunities to improve staffing strategies, workflow design, and workplace support before burnout escalates.
Built for nurses, by nurses became more than a philosophy. It became the foundation of the product itself.
And while the nursing platform represents a major milestone, for Tiffany and Sisi, it is still part of a larger vision: helping healthcare organizations better understand the health of entire care teams – physicians, nurses, advanced practice providers, and operational staff – as one interconnected workforce ecosystem.
But the mission itself remains simple.
Listen closely. Build collaboratively. Create technology that helps healthcare organizations better support the people who care for patients every day.