How NorthStar Anesthesia built a scheduling app for a workforce of 3,000 clinicians in weeks

How NorthStar Anesthesia built a scheduling app for a workforce of 3,000 clinicians in weeks | Databricks Blog Skip to main content

Summary

NorthStar Anesthesia runs a clinical workforce across 25+ states. Scheduling visibility essential for clinicians to do their jobs.

Their commercial scheduling platform was missing data clinicians actually needed, and dashboards weren't mobile-friendly enough to fill the gap.

They built and shipped a custom scheduling app on Databricks Apps in weeks, using security and data infrastructure already in place.

Introduction NorthStar Anesthesia manages anesthesia staffing services across 25+ U.S. states with a workforce of roughly 3,000 physicians and Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs) rotating across facilities, overnight shifts, and on-call rotations. These clinicians do not have steady access to a computer on the job, so they rely on their phones between cases to try to figure out who's scheduled for the week. When the company adopted a new commercial scheduling platform, it handled most of the job. But there was one thing it deliberately hid: colleagues' time-off data. For a workforce that trades shifts constantly, this presents a big problem. Dashboards weren't user-friendly enough NorthStar and implementation partner Synaptiq had already built a solid Databricks foundation — scheduling, time tracking, and contract data unified across a medallion architecture, with AI/BI dashboards replacing the old Power BI setup. The natural first instinct was to close the scheduling gap with another dashboard, but the pilot didn't work for the end users. "Because of the lack of mobile friendliness — it just didn't look clean in the way that we wanted it to — we pivoted to the app," said Erin Sarosi Bell, Program Manager at Synaptiq. The case for building on Databricks Apps was straightforward: the data was already there, the governance was already configured, and Microsoft Entra ID SSO could extend to the entire clinical workforce without standing up new infrastructure. From requirements to release in weeks Synaptiq got to work and with a single software engineer built a React TypeScript app deployed via Databricks Apps in only a few weeks. Color-coded shift views by clinician type, facility selectors, day/week/month calendar modes, shift notes, search and filter by shift type — all refreshing every 30 minutes. And crucially, this app surfaces the time-off data the commercial tool buries.

"Within a matter of weeks, we were able to build something that met the need and iterate on it rapidly, pushing out multiple releases," said Dan Levine, CTO at NorthStar. "It solved a huge pain point for our users." Daily unique users have climbed from 75–80 at launch to 110+ as the first wave of clinicians migrates to the new platform. The feedback has been direct: "dozens and dozens" of users writing in to say it changed how they work and removed a considerable amount of stress from their scheduling workflows. Next on the list for Northstar: AI/BI Genie for natural language shift queries, push notifications, and automating the morning staffing report with Databricks . See how healthcare and life sciences teams are building on the Databricks Platform and  learn more about Databricks Apps .

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