QGenda: Empowering Healthcare Providers

Amy Wu, Calvin Yeoh, Caroline Xie, Tengbo Li And Will Griffith | June 10, 2020

The founder started at age 15 and only took one round of funding in two decades

Many entrepreneurial stories begin under unlikely circumstances, but the story of QGenda, ICONIQ Growth’s most recent investment, stands out to us as unique. At the age of fifteen, Greg Benoit, Founder and CEO, developed the initial idea for QGenda as a summer project to help a family friend, an anesthesiologist, create an automated call schedule for physicians at his medical practice. Greg’s reward for completing the project? $1,000.

While many of us quickly forgot the details of our summer jobs, Greg saw an opportunity to build a business to solve the difficult problem of physician scheduling at scale. Throughout high school and college, Greg leaned into the opportunity, wrote the first lines of code and personally called on prospective customers to generate the company’s initial revenue. Over two decades, Greg took only one round of funding, grew QGenda into an organization with over 300 employees and built the company into the modern SaaS leader in healthcare workforce management. We are truly thrilled to announce our partnership with Greg and the team at QGenda!

Physician scheduling is a complicated, multi-factor optimization problem. The processes that exist to address it remain almost as manual and broken as when Greg set out to build QGenda years ago. Imagine being tasked with scheduling shifts at a large health system employing hundreds of physicians working across different facilities and specialties, ranging from radiology to emergency medicine. Producing a centralized schedule that determines where each physician should be at every hour of the day, while accounting for factors such as physician preferences, credentials, facility- and department-specific requirements and vacation schedules, is a nightmarish task. Prior to QGenda, health systems would staff clinicians to produce such schedules using spreadsheets or, courageously, sticky notes. These methods could take days, were error-prone and took clinicians away from their core mission — to serve patients.

QGenda’s solution addresses these pain points through cloud-based software that automatically generates schedules for physicians, residents and nurse practitioners. QGenda’s algorithmic approach optimizes schedules around all relevant factors, driving an immediate and demonstrable impact on customers. Using QGenda, hospitals and physicians’ groups report a 50% reduction in time to create schedules and 50% reduction in time making changes to schedules.1 These efficiencies empower healthcare providers to focus on taking care of patients rather than dealing with repetitive administrative work.

Our conversations with QGenda customers have highlighted just how important QGenda is to the operations of health systems and the livelihoods of frontline healthcare providers. They highlighted the stark contrast between the intelligent, automated scheduling enabled by QGenda and the cumbersome, manual processes they previously used. They emphasized the significant ROI they derive from the platform in terms of hours saved, revenue generated and clinician morale elevated. They underscored how deeply embedded the product is in their workflows, and how well it addresses customer pain points specific to diverse specialties and clinical settings.

"QGenda is on an incredible trajectory as it transitions from being the scheduling platform of choice for departments and physicians’ groups to the workforce system of record for entire medical organizations."

We are hugely impressed with QGenda’s success to date and are equally thrilled about the opportunity ahead of the company. QGenda’s presence in many of the nation’s leading health systems is noteworthy, highlighting how effectively the platform addresses the needs of even the most complex healthcare organizations. In addition, QGenda has recently extended its long history of innovation to other important product categories beyond scheduling, such as time tracking, compensation management, analytics and on-call. These products are already delivering significant value to QGenda’s customers and experiencing strong adoption.

Now, amid an unprecedented global health crisis, QGenda has become more salient than ever, providing stability and insight to organizations seeking to address greater complexity and patient flow. In light of the surge of COVID-19 cases, QGenda is helping healthcare organizations better understand provider availability, track and manage patient demand and successfully match provider supply and patient demand. In managing capacity across our healthcare systems, QGenda is mission-critical in helping heroes on the front lines provide crucial care for patients.

We could not be more excited to partner with an organization having such a positive impact during these uncertain times. QGenda represents our third healthcare IT investment this year, our latest investment in the vibrant Atlanta tech ecosystem and a powerful addition to our family of vertical SaaS portfolio companies, including Benchling, FreeWill, Procore, Relativity, Restaurant365, ServiceTitan, Truckstop and Zinier. We are thrilled to join Greg, the QGenda team and Francisco Partners on the journey ahead!

[1] From QGenda website