Imagine starting your day knowing you’ll face a relentless stream of urgent medical needs and the daunting prospect of too few hands for too much work. This is a day in the life of a nurse – a reality where passion meets exhaustion, and dedication often leads to burnout. In hospitals worldwide, understaffing burdens nurses and adversely affects patient care.
Caregility customer Janelle Jones, BSN, RN, knows the struggle all too well. With 15 years as an ER nurse and over a decade as a travel nurse, Janelle has witnessed firsthand the impact of these challenges on healthcare professionals and patients. Her deep-rooted desire to support fellow nurses and her Louisville community spurred her down the path of entrepreneurship.
In 2023, Janelle opened the staffing agency Vitality Solutions. The company was her answer to healthcare’s escalating clinical workforce problem – a crisis so severe that, as Janelle points out, “We risk losing 85% of nurses this year if we don’t implement changes. Nationally, the turnover rate is 34% for nurses in their first year.” Factors such as burnout, health complications, and family needs often pull these essential workers away from the profession.
Janelle’s venture quickly resonated. Within three months, she and her team were collaborating with over 200 hospitals across 30 states—many of which Janelle worked with during her tenure as a travel nurse. Unsurprisingly, all were understaffed.
“Nurses are often viewed as a cost burden, not as revenue providers,” Janelle observes. “You can’t bill for their services, yet they represent the largest workforce in our nation. And they’re often forced to do more with less. We can’t change lean staffing, but we can find more sustainable solutions that bring nurses back. I wanted to find new opportunities to give nurses a better quality of life.”
Janelle recently took another step to meet that objective by launching Revitalized Solutions, a new Virtual Nursing facet of her staffing agency. Her hospital clients were searching for a sustainable way to safely staff their units amidst the nursing crisis.
“After the pandemic, travel nursing became financially unsustainable, and hospitals hemorrhaged funds trying to maintain safe staffing levels,” says Janelle. “I first envisioned this model when one of my hospitals had to start sending patients home because we simply didn’t have the space to care for them in-house. We had to get creative. This is where the idea for Revitalized Solutions was born. As an ER nurse, navigating impossible situations is part of the job, so I started brainstorming ways to create unique, supportive opportunities for nurses. I want to reduce burnout and hope to bring back thousands of experienced nurses who left the profession—whether due to on-the-job back injuries, the physical toll of walking 15 miles a day on the floor, or other limitations. These nurses still have invaluable knowledge and expertise to share, and Virtual Nursing gives them a way to do it while strengthening the health system as a whole.”
That mission sent Janelle in search of a virtual care platform that could connect experienced nurses with various hospital campuses remotely, which led her to Caregility. The platform’s focus on acute care workflows, EHR integration, and patient-specific smart alerts designed to reduce alarm fatigue caught her attention.
Today, Janelle leads a team of virtual nurses and paramedics who support Hospital-at-Home programs and inpatient visits, handling tasks from remote patient admissions and discharges to virtual sitting and charting. “We can monitor code strokes, sepsis protocol, and throughput in hospital ERs; ICU, Surgery, and Labor and Delivery rooms; as well as outside the hospital.”
Looking to the future, Janelle is exploring opportunities to serve Long-Term Acute Care facilities and community-based health settings like schools and clinics, which are often under-resourced. She is also considering the development of mobile patient clinics.
Janelle’s passion and mission paint an interesting portrait of nursing empowerment in 2025. She is a staunch advocate for the voice of nurses, ever mindful of the happy nurse / healthy patient correlation. “The odds of patient mortality increase by 7% for every additional patient in the nurse’s workload above the national safety standard for ratios,” Janelle notes. One of her main objectives is to help hospitals manage staffing ratios more safely. She finds reassurance in technology solutions finally being aimed at the workhorse of the healthcare workforce: nurses.
“Sometimes you have ten patients in the ER and five of them are on ventilators. You can’t be everywhere at once. A virtual nurse can handle administrative burdens, help watch patients, and add a second layer of security. Those extra eyes, hands, and brains will change healthcare.”
