Ollivate Named a Top 20 PitchMI Company & Top 5 Healthcare Startup

A few weeks ago, Michigan Rise asked us to attend a quick a meeting.

We zoomed in to see confetti popping.

They had invited us there to tell us that Ollivate was selected as one of the Top 20 companies competing in PitchMI this year—and one of the Top 5 healthcare companies.

And now, on October 1, Josh and I will get to represent our entire Ollivate team on the PitchMI stage right here in Detroit.

It’s exciting for all the obvious reasons. But it also feels like a meaningful moment to look at what our team has built over the last 18 months.

Read the full announcement on the MSU Foundation site

We’re building a different way to learn in healthcare

When we started Ollivate, we weren’t trying to make another question bank.

We kept coming back to a bigger problem: healthcare professionals have an enormous amount of information they need to learn—and actually retain. They need it to pass boards, certainly, but they also need to be able to retrieve that knowledge years later when there is a real patient in front of them.

And so much of the education designed to accomplish that isn’t working with how our brains actually learn and remember something forever.

We thought we could change that.

Ollivate uses gamification and learning science to make healthcare education more engaging, more social, and something people actually want to come back to.

We started with nurse anesthesia education and completely gamified board preparation. And I don’t mean we built a question bank and put a leaderboard on it.

We built the learning experience around the things that make games compelling in the first place: progress, challenge, competition, immediate feedback, rewards, community and the desire to come back tomorrow and keep going.

Then we started applying that same approach to other places healthcare professionals have to learn.

We launched accredited, gamified continuing education for practicing providers. Continuing education is required throughout a healthcare professional’s career, but that doesn’t mean it has to feel like a box to check.

We’ve also brought Ollivate into live healthcare conferences. At the AANA Annual Congress, anesthesia residents and RNs competed against one another through Ollivate while they were together in person. Watching a room full of healthcare professionals voluntarily pull out their phones and compete over clinical knowledge was one of those moments when we thought: yes. This is what we were trying to build.

And right now, nurse anesthesia programs across the country are competing in our September School Showdown. Students and alumni are playing for their universities, climbing the leaderboard and trying to bring a trophy back to their program.

They’re studying.

But it doesn’t feel like studying.

That distinction is at the heart of Ollivate.

Gamification isn’t the goal. Better learning is.

We talk a lot about fun at Ollivate, but we aren’t making healthcare education fun just for the sake of making it fun.

Engagement matters because learning requires repetition.

If we can create an experience that makes a student answer 20 more questions, come back tomorrow, retrieve something they learned last week, compete with a classmate or voluntarily spend more time with difficult material, the game mechanics have done something much more important than entertain them.

They’ve helped create another opportunity to learn.

That’s why we care so much about combining learning science with great product design. Healthcare professionals are asked to retain an extraordinary amount of knowledge, and ultimately that knowledge affects real people and real patient care.

We want to build technology that respects how important that is—and also respects the human being doing the learning.

What started with nurse anesthesia can go much further

Nurse anesthesia has been an incredible first market for Ollivate because it gave us the opportunity to build alongside a highly motivated community of students, educators and practicing clinicians.

But the problem we’re solving isn’t unique to anesthesia.

Nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and other healthcare professionals all move through the same cycle: learn an enormous amount of material, pass high-stakes exams, enter practice and continue learning for the rest of their careers.

Our long-term vision is to build the learning platform that can support healthcare professionals throughout that entire journey—from school, to boards, to practice, to continuing education.

And to make that learning something they actually want to do.

The community has become one of my favorite parts

There is something else happening inside Ollivate that is harder to put on a pitch slide.

People are learning together.

They compete with each other. They represent their schools. They compare progress. They cheer each other on. They get very invested in leaderboards.

And somewhere in there, studying becomes a little less lonely.

As someone who came into this company as an educator, that matters a lot to me.

Technology can make learning more efficient. AI can make information easier to access. But I think some of the most important education technology we’re going to build over the next decade will also make people want to participate.

That’s the opportunity we see.

And we get to pitch it in Detroit

Ollivate is a Detroit company. We live here. We are building our company here. So there is something especially meaningful about getting to take the PitchMI stage in our own city.

We’re also incredibly grateful to Michigan Rise. They’ve been in our corner, and now we get the opportunity to work even more closely with their team through this experience.

I also love that PitchMI makes room for community and fun alongside serious innovation.

Clearly, we believe those things belong together.

Our brains need it. Our hearts do too.

And finally, this recognition belongs to our team.

Startups require an almost unreasonable amount of belief, creativity, problem solving and persistence from the people building them.

Josh and I get to walk onto that stage, but we’re representing all of them.

We can’t wait.

See you October 1, Detroit.