How Konvoj is changing the scheduling game in elderly care

1. Tell us about yourself and your professional journey thus far. What is Konvoj? What's the story behind/origin story? Why did you decide to start Konvoj?

My name is Tilda and I have a background in data science and mathematical optimization. My academic background is within industrial engineering, with a specialization in applied mathematics, and I was educated at KTH in Stockholm. With Konvoj, I’m building a scheduling platform, tailor-made for the municipal care sector (i.e., primarily elderly care and care for people with functional variations). At its core lies an innovative optimization algorithm, which can automatically generate schedules that are efficient, fair and human-centered. 

I started building on an embryo of what was about to become the scheduling algorithm during my studies at KTH. Back then, I built a scheduling algorithm for a call center. And of course, I also have a lot to thank to my time working at Jeppesen, a Boeing subsidiary, who are building scheduling optimization software for the aviation industry. Also, during my exchange studies in Sydney, I studied scheduling optimization for the aviation industry, so having both hands-on and theoretical knowledge of aviation scheduling optimization has been very valuable.

Why did I decide to start Konvoj? Well, when a couple of years ago learned about the scheduling challenges faced by the municipal care sector, it caught my interest immediately. I learned why inefficient and fragmented scheduling is both a welfare issue and a work environment issue.

So first let me explain why this is a welfare issue. Inefficient and fragmented scheduling in this sector means inefficient use of welfare resources, and thus lesser quality for the people receiving care. We’ve seen this during the pandemic, with a very high share of workers paid by the hour and elderly who receive care from 10, 15 even 20 different people every week. Schedules that are this squeezed and fragmented are not making it easy for the nurses working in this sector to give high-quality and human-centered care.  

Secondly, bad scheduling is also a work environment issue. Assistant nurse (undersköterska) in the elderly care sector is Sweden’s single most common occupation, with 132 000 people employed. Bad schedules and bad scheduling cause stress and risk of burn-out. Bad schedules don’t give you enough time to recover and bad scheduling takes a lot of time and often leads to conflicts with managers or even colleagues. That too, can be exhausting. The workers’ union Kommunal released a report last month saying that 1 out of 3 people working in the elderly care sector don’t see themselves staying there in 3 years’ time. Squeezed, unhealthy, and unfair schedules are a huge part of this.

Better scheduling is an important piece of the puzzle, but of course, we must acknowledge it’s not a cure-all. More resources are needed to address today’s understaffing – more nurses need to be employed to meet the needs of an ageing population. Moreover, the occupational status of nurses needs to be improved through higher wages, more colleagues, and more focus on the core nursing tasks (i.e., cleaning, cooking, washing and such tasks should be done by specialized staff hired for that purpose). With that said, I decided to start Konvoj to be a part of the solution. My ambition is to build a tool that helps this sector create efficient, fair and human-centered schedules.  

2. Describe the service/product.

I’ve been focusing these last couple of months on understanding the current situation in depth. I recently finished a survey where 1530 nurses, managers and politicians participated from 246 municipalities, and I’ve interviewed a lot of different people working in the sector.

Today, many municipalities do their scheduling fully by hand, on a white board or in Excel. It has also become evident from the survey and the interviews that the scheduling process is extremely time consuming and often characterized by conflict. Despite the extreme amount of time spent on scheduling, unfair and unhealthy schedules that violate the Swedish Working Hours Act are very common.

With Konvoj, I’m developing a scheduling algorithm and platform, tailor-made for the municipal care sector and built to address these challenges. The key features of the platform are of course, the optimization algorithm, but also a modern and user-friendly interface where administrators can enter input data, manually adjust details in the automatically generated schedules, and get a helicopter overview of important metrics across multiple teams.  

The key values of the platform are, first and foremost, that automatic scheduling lessens the time spent on scheduling from weeks to hours, but it also gives employees control through individual settings, preferences, and vetos. In addition, the algorithm ensures that any surplus staffing is smoothly distributed across teams and days – and thus saving fill-in costs. The algorithm achieves all this by handling a long range of hard criteria and soft criteria. Hard criteria (e.g., Working Hours Act) are always met and soft criteria (e.g., shift distribution fairness) are optimized using adjustable weights.

The future customers of this platform are elderly care homes (special housing or “SÄBO” in Swedish), home care service (“hemtjänst” in Swedish) and special housing for people with functional variations (“gruppbostad” in Swedish) – either run by municipalities or private actors.  

3.  Where do you see Konvoj in 5 years?

My ambition is that within 5 years, Konvoj has in a tangible and significant way contributed to solving the scheduling challenges that I mentioned earlier. I hope to see that the schedules in this sector have become human-centered, more personalized, more sustainable, and more resource efficient. I hope that better scheduling has contributed to turning around the understaffing trend, which I find to be very worrying. 

Also, my ambition is that Konvoj has built a tool based on modern technology, tailor-made for the needs of the people working in this sector, and not the other way around. Today, this is unfortunately way too rare. A sector like the municipal care sector hasn’t been prioritized enough, especially from an IT perspective.

4. How is Konvoj going to create an impact for a sustainable future?

As I’ve mentioned earlier, inefficient and fragmented scheduling is both a welfare issue and work environment issue. My ambition is for Konvoj to create a positive social impact by helping to solve these issues through efficient, fair and human-centered scheduling.  

We’ve seen so clearly during the pandemic what an understaffed and under-resourced elderly care sector leads to. So far, the people working in this sector has taken the hit, spreading thin and going the extra mile, even though there isn’t enough time and even though they’re exhausted. It’s about time we stop thanking them with applauses and empty words, and instead make sure they have the resources they need and the efficient, human-centered schedules they deserve, to be able to do what they do best: take care of those in need of care.  

But I should also stress that in addition to being a welfare and work environment issue, inefficient and inhumane scheduling is also a women’s issue. Assistant nurse (undersköterska) in the elderly care sector is Sweden’s single most common occupation and 91 % of them are women. Moreover, managers in this sector are also overrepresented by women. There are 8 000 managers in the elderly care sector and 85 % of them are women. And from the care receiver’s perspective, this also impacts women disproportionately, since 65% of people that receive elderly care are women. 

5.  If there are any readers of this article that wish to support you in any way, how can they do that?

Right now, I’m on the lookout for great product designers, frontend developers and backend developers. If you have this kind of profile, or if you know someone who has, then reach out!   

I’m also having dialogues with potential investors. I’m looking for investors that highly value the social impact aspect of their investments and that share my long-term vision of efficient, fair and human-centered scheduling for municipal sector. If you’re an investor, and you have this kind of profile, or if you know someone who has, then reach out!

Also, I’m always interested in hearing about new perspectives on the scheduling challenges. Maybe you’re working in this sector and want to share your view on schedules and scheduling? Or maybe you have a family member receiving care. The relative’s perspective is also really important when it comes to scheduling and especially continuity.  

6. How can the WIT GBG community support you?

Same answer here as question 5! Also, I’d like to share that I’m just getting started with the WITGBG Venture Studio program, which I’m really excited about. The advisors all have really impressive and relevant backgrounds, so I think these sessions we have planned are going to be of great value.