The founder
I'm Kristen Cline — an emergency and critical-care nurse for two decades. I didn't come to healthcare's problems from a slide deck. I came to them from the bedside, the flight deck, and the trauma bay. Nightingale OS is what those problems look like when a nurse is the one who gets to fix them.
How a nurse would fix healthcare
Hospital software is built for the people who buy it, not the people who use it at 3 a.m. with a crashing patient. I spent twenty years routing around tools that made the work harder — charting systems that demanded clicks while someone was dying, dashboards that measured nurses like widgets, "safety" features that protected the institution and no one else.
So the design laws came first, and the code came second. The slack is sacred. Defaults protect. The patient is never "the bed." Those aren't slogans I added to a finished product — they're constraints I built the product to obey, because I know exactly what it costs at the bedside when they're broken.
This is what it looks like when the person who lived the problem holds the pen.
How it was built
I'm not going to pretend a lone nurse hand-wrote a hospital operating system. I designed it and built it with AI coding agents as my hands — and every architectural decision passed through code-review consulting from a senior engineer at NVIDIA. The clinical judgment is mine. The engineering is rigorous. The honesty about how it was made is the point.
Every workflow, law, and refusal comes from twenty years at the bedside.
A new way of building — a domain expert directing engineering, not waiting in a backlog.
Senior-engineer code-review consulting on architecture and rigor.
The record
I won't reprint my CV here — twenty years of it is a lot. A few highlights, and the writing, stand on their own.
Peer-reviewed & textbooks
Public writing & press
Recognition & roles
In her own words
By clinicians, for clinicians
A burnout check-in is a feature. A staffing grid is a feature. A throughput board is a feature. Nightingale is the operating system underneath all of them — governed by the people who do the work. As we grow, nurses lead the teams. The domain expertise sits at the head of the table, not in an advisory footnote.
It protects staff by changing the conditions that harm them — not by asking them to breathe deeper.
It knows why a floor is unsafe before the schedule is built — and refuses to break the resilience floor.
Flow is one stream in the fabric. The fabric is the product. The bundles are what you see.
Charlie gives back
We're establishing a foundation so the value of connection isn't just a word on a website. Two commitments to start — funded as we grow.
Backing the next generation of nurses into the profession and up through it.
Direct help for clinicians in crisis — because the people who catch everyone else deserve a net too.