The ChecklistRN website and family of products is brought to you by the Sheridan Programmers Guild. Right now the only permanent, full-time member of the Guild is me, Anne Gunn. And I may be the opposite of who you would expect to find developing phone apps for nurses.

I don’t live in Silicon Valley or any of the other technology hotspots of the world.  I live in and work from Sheridan, Wyoming, where the high plains meet the Bighorn Mountains.  I was born in Wyoming and returned here after many (many!) years of living in Montana and New England.  Wyoming doesn’t appeal to a lot of people as a place to live; we rank solidly in last place among U.S. states for population.  But it is a great place to start and run a business.  Some of the folks who work with me in the Guild are here in Wyoming, some are scattered elsewhere around the country.

I’m not a nurse or other healthcare professional. I’ve been in the software business my whole working life.  So when I wanted to start a company focused on building phone apps, I had to depend on others to tell me about the tools they need at work.  Luckily, my good friend Denise is both a nurse and experienced in the software industry and she gave me the idea for our first nursing product, PasswordRN.  And now that I’m talking to nurses, other health care workers, and to other companies that supply tools to them, I’m getting a more suggestions all the time.  (If you have an idea for a phone app that you can’t currently find in the marketplaces, please contact us.)

Why do we develop apps specifically for nurses? We sure don’t have anything against doctors.  And we know that many phone apps work equally well for doctors, nurses, and technicians.  Reference works, such as the Epocrates line of apps, are useful across the board.  But we do think that a bedside nurse’s job is fundamentally different that that of a doctor’s.  And while we see lots of apps being produced for the diagnostic and decision-making needs of doctors, we don’t see a lot of apps written to help nurses in the more hands-on work they do with patients.

The corporate haiku of the Sheridan Programmers Guild is:

Simple, working code

for smart, hardworking people.

Do just one thing well.

We hope to write many, many apps in the next few years.  But we do want each of them to do just one thing very well.  Please let us know if you think our products are living up to that standard or not.