We started with a simple question "What do nurses really want from an app?".

The Ascension Nursing Center of Excellence (ANCoE) initiative was created to focus on the needs of nurses and take a fresh look at how they are being served by technology. Its mission was to make Ascension the best place to practice nursing.

Amy Wilson, Senior VP, Clinical Operations at Ascension, approached Athlon to create a new app for nurses to support them in their personal and professional lives.

To discover what nurses wanted, we conducted interviews and workshops across the country. We asked Ascension nurses to rate and rank app features based on importance and how frequently they'd use them. We lead workshops, asking nurses to group features and held roundtables to understand how they wanted technology to support them.

“We wanted to help nurses get easier access to information, remove friction and highlight the many career opportunities open to them so they can grow and flourish in nursing.” April Tinsely, VP,
Ascension Nursing Center of Excellence.

We were able to identify the most wanted features and organize the product plan, putting nurses' needs first. The success of the app depended on nurses finding the app intuitive, easy to use, and highly relevant to them.

“Designed by nurses for nurses” was a guiding principle throughout the design process, ensuring that nurses were involved in feature discovery, and design validation.
In the same spirit, we proposed that nurses should name the app.

In collaboration with the NCoE, we created a naming contest that collected over 1000 name submissions and after over 15,000 votes were cast, we had a winner, ‘OneNurse’.

To promote the launch, Athlon produced a short film to tell the story of the nurse-centered design and highlight key app features. Filmed and shot on location(s) in Tulsa, OK.