A nurse on the night shift cannot easily sit in a classroom, and hospitals must train their staff all the time, from new safety rules to required certifications. HealthStream, founded in Nashville in 1990, brought that training online. Its courses and tracking tools let hospitals prove that staff had completed required learning. It went public in April 2000, one of a wave of companies bringing health care onto the internet.

Training Records for Hospitals

HealthStream bet that hospitals would move required training onto the web and pay for it by subscription. Its platform delivered courses and kept records of who had completed what. Over time it added tools for scheduling, credentialing and measuring patient experience. It focused on a single industry, which let it build deep relationships with hospital systems. Its customers range from small community hospitals to large health systems.

Still in Nashville

HealthStream priced its IPO at $9 a share in April 2000 and listed on Nasdaq. Its shares fell in the dot-com crash. The company kept growing as hospitals adopted online learning, and it expanded into workforce and credentialing software. It is one of the few health care internet companies from 2000 still operating independently. HealthStream is still public, still based in Nashville, and trades as HSTM.

Cover: The Lamp, Mary Cassatt. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a woman by the lamp (the night shift).