Brianne M. Casey ’16 decided to attend Shenandoah because of the reputation of the university’s health professions programs and the high percentage rate of Shenandoah graduates who accept a job in their field. Casey also loved the small size of Shenandoah. “The fact that Shenandoah is a small private school is its best asset,” said Casey. “My first two degrees were from a very large, prestigious state university where I was just a number and I had no support. At Shenandoah, all of the faculty in the Eleanor Wade Custer School of Nursing knew me by name and worked really hard to help me meet my career goals. That personalization is what got me to where I am, and it made the transition from academic to professional life seamless.”
Casey is currently an emergency room registered nurse (RN) for Winchester Medical Center in Winchester, Virginia. In this position, she helps take care of patients who need help with illnesses and injuries. And, the most rewarding experiences in her career are being able to stabilize critical patients and seeing the relief on the patient’s family’s faces.
Casey is also the CEO and founder of the app, Checked In. Checked In is a mobile application suite that measures and publishes patient wait times for emergency rooms, urgent cares, primary and specialty providers, as well as dentist offices. Casey is constantly applying her knowledge and experience from the emergency room, as well as a lot of research from the nursing field, to further develop her products to fit the needs of both patients and healthcare providers.
For Casey, the idea started with a nursing research paper she completed at Shenandoah, which helped her identify a need for the patient population and solve the problem of patient overcrowding for healthcare providers. “As soon as I knew that I had to develop a patient wait time app, I wanted to focus all of my energy into this,” she said. “Instead of shutting me down, the faculty allowed me to integrate this idea into projects for other classes so that they could help me continue to explore and develop the possibilities, and also move forward with learning the other lessons and develop the other skills that I needed to be an RN. They really individualized my experience to ‘be my best me’ and catered to my personal interests and career goals while also helping me to become an ER nurse.”
The app launched in May 2018, and can be found on the App Store and Google Play. Now that product development is over, Casey must start the real work, which is beta testing the apps at doctors’ offices.
Casey’s advice to students is: “Do not just do the bare minimum to meet your graduation requirements. Really take ownership of all of your work (research papers, projects etc.), you never know where it will lead you. Also, take time to enjoy yourself and be well rounded. I did not just participate in academics at SU, I also did some theatre, and I am so glad that I did!”