When Joshua Olson, CRNA, began teaching nurse-anesthesia students, he noticed a pattern: brilliant students burning out and forgetting much of what they’d studied. Despite decades of research on spaced repetition, retrieval practice and gamification, health care education hadn’t caught up. This has created a dangerous gap in a field where knowledge saves lives, caused by inefficient, antiquated learning models.
After experimenting with modern learning techniques in class, a student asked, “What if we combined all these methods into one tool?” That question led Joshua and his wife April, an educator and learning designer, to create Ollivate, a platform that makes studying active, engaging and human. Designed to feel more like Duolingo than a digital textbook, Ollivate uses gamification and AI to nudge learners to review key concepts before they forget them.
Launching first in nurse-anesthesia education, Ollivate quickly caught the attention of the American Association of Nurse Anesthesiology (AANA). The association partnered and invested, giving its 70,000 members access to Ollivate. Through the MSU Research Foundation’s Conquer Detroit Accelerator, powered by Henry Ford Health, the founders turned their prototype into a scalable startup.
With 6,000 learners in less than a year, Ollivate has surpassed $100,000 in annual recurring revenue and continues to grow rapidly. Based in Detroit, the Olsons are building what they call a “lifelong learning companion” for health care with plans to expand into other industries where professionals must keep skills sharp.
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