By Joanna Yang Yowler, Ph.D.
Flinn Foundation
On the mainstage at the Flinn Foundation’s inaugural Bioscience Storytellers event, Jasmine Bhatti recounted her experience caregiving for her grandmother — and how it solidified a career in nursing.
The founder and CEO of Navi Nurses spoke of the pain she and her fellow health care professionals carried throughout the pandemic and how late nights of pizza and ice cream fueled her entrepreneurial journey “to be that person who makes it better for other people.”
Today, Phoenix-based Navi Nurses employs 200 nurses across the Valley. The company delivered 30,000 hours of care in 2024 and is scaling its mission to bring coordinated care to Arizonans in medical crises.
“Nurses are people too.”
This simple, yet powerful, statement is one of Bhatti’s core beliefs, but it took years of experience to coalesce a solution in the form of Navi Nurses.
From idea to company
Originally envisioned as the “Uber of nursing,” Navi Nurses started out as an idea in a notebook that might have never seen the light of day.
Bhatti didn’t feel empowered to show her ideas to anyone — much less to act upon them — until she serendipitously met a guest lecturer at the ASU HEALab for a course she was teaching. Rick Hall, Ph.D., helped her sift through her notes and narrow her initial focus. Then, he introduced her to people and resources across the Valley.
“He was the person that gave me permission to have my ideas be heard,” Bhatti said.
One connection led to another, and soon Bhatti was applying for ASU’s Venture Devils Program. But just as her team started filming their application video, the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down.
Hesitant to leave her fellow nurses and patients behind, Bhatti built a routine where she’d work her scheduled shifts in the COVID unit while advancing her business acumen and Navi Nurses on her days off.
The first clients came from Facebook, and after the third client booked, she stepped away from her day job at the hospital. Growth was steady, but an inflection point came in the form of a client who needed 24/7 care for her husband — quickly ballooning the Navi Nurses team from three to more than 25 nurses.
An emerging value proposition
“We give our nurses the ability to connect with the people that they’re caring for. And when we are able to combine the things that make us human with what they need, it’s like magic to watch.”
The key to success? Sticking to the company’s dual, intertwined goals to make health care better for patients — and for nurses. The Navi Nurses care model emphasizes human connection, where nurses can just be present for their patients without having to worry about overly cumbersome documentation or restrictive timelines. The magic is in the details, such as matching cultural backgrounds, or discretionary spending to treat patients to their favorite coffee, or a zero-tolerance policy toward hostility and aggression between nursing staff.
Results speak for themselves. Reviews from patients, their families, and staff members are glowing. One staff study has shown that the Navi Nurses model reduces burnout frequency and severity. On the patients’ end, a study is ongoing to study 30-day readmissions after just four hours of Navi Nurses intervention.
The next steps
“I’ve just learned so much along the way that when I go back to build something, it’s going to look so much different because I’ve seen and experienced so much more.”
The journey hasn’t been without its setbacks, yet Bhatti is more confident than ever in her entrepreneurial talents. She’s automated her payroll, brought on three other fractional leaders to steer growth, and employed her first full-time person to help build the company’s product.
What’s next for the 2022 Flinn Foundation Bioscience Entrepreneurship Program participant? Bhatti is returning to the large vision she had when she first started Navi Nurses. She’s targeting hospital and institutional partnerships to assign transition nurses to discharged patients in a bid to prevent readmissions. She’s pursuing insurance coverage for this market segment, pending positive data from her ongoing trials. She’s also planning for expansion — both in the Valley and beyond Arizona’s borders.
The journeys that people take are irrevocably shaped by their experiences and their interactions with others around them. In her own words:
“And so I think back to Bali, and I think about this idea: how every single soul has conspired for me to be here. My grandmother. That man in room 18. They’re why I‘m here, and they’re why I’m building this magic.”