HOW A NURSE-FOUNDER BUILT A LIONESS-LED HEALTH TECH COMPANY
- Rose Odette
- Nov 14
- 5 min read
Today’s Lead Like a Lioness Daily Spark is a deep dive spotlight on: CINDY BAUER, BSN, RN – Founder & CEO, Coordinista
🌟 LIONESS SPOTLIGHT: CINDY BAUER & COORDINISTA (REAL-WORLD FACTS) - HEALTH TECH
Background: Cindy is a University of Michigan–trained RN who started her career in critical care, working ICU and oncology, then long-term care, care management, transitions of care, and hospice.
Frontline Insight: As a care manager doing in-home, hospital, and skilled nursing facility coordination, she saw that traditional EHRs and care platforms were built for desks—not for nurses delivering decentralized, in-the-field care.
Proven Impact: By applying tech and field-deployment strategies she’d learned from political ground-game work to healthcare, she cut hospital readmissions for her own caseload by about 30%—before she ever founded Coordinista.
Founder Origin Moment: When her employer lost a contract and 150 people lost their jobs, she decided to stop waiting for someone else to fix the system and created Coordinista to give field clinicians the tools they actually need.
What Coordinista Does: A cloud-based home and field care management platform for providers—centralized coordination, decentralized execution—built specifically for high-risk, high-acuity populations and nurse-led field teams. The company is based in Kalamazoo, founded in 2019, and is a seed-stage startup backed by investors like City Side Ventures and XLerateHealth.
Validation:
Mission (in her own strategy): Provide the best field-care tools in the nation so nurses and care teams can deliver timely, efficient, and humane care—without burning out.
We had her on The Michigan Innovation Podcast, where she walked through her journey from bedside nursing to tech founder—so this one is very much “lioness we actually know in the wild,” not theory.
INTRODUCTION
There’s a particular kind of woman who walks into a broken system, sees people suffering on both sides of the chart—patients and clinicians—and instead of complaining, she builds an entirely new operating system - HEALTH TECH.
That’s what Cindy Bauer did.
She went from critical care nurse to transitions-of-care coach to politically savvy ground-game operator, and then fused it all into Coordinista, a nurse-led health tech company designed to stop patients from falling through the cracks and stop nurses from burning out.
This is Lioness leadership in its purest form: Not cute. Not theoretical. Operational. Clinical. Relentless.
THE PROBLEM SHE REFUSED TO IGNORE
Cindy didn’t start with a pitch deck. She started with pain:
Nurses and social workers drowning in clunky systems that weren’t built for field work.
Colleagues so stressed they were getting sick, going on antidepressants, or leaving the profession—before the extra pressure of COVID.
High-risk patients bouncing in and out of hospitals because coordination broke down once they left the building.
And then the tipping point: The company she worked for lost a contract. 150 people out of work overnight. That kind of shock either collapses you—or clarifies you. For Cindy, it clarified everything:
“If the tools don’t exist, I’ll build them. If the model doesn’t exist, I’ll design it.”
She took the same tech and field-strategy skills she had used to organize statewide political campaigns and rerouted them into care delivery—deploying mobile teams, tightening feedback loops, and cutting readmissions in her caseload by about 30%.
That’s when Coordinista stopped being an idea and became a mandate.
FIVE LIONESS IDEALS CINDY EMBODIES
1. Bedside Before Boardroom
Cindy’s authority doesn’t come from a spreadsheet—it comes from years at the bedside, in ICU, oncology, long-term care, hospice, and complex care coordination.
Lioness lesson: Your credibility is exponential when your tech or business actually grows out of lived frontline experience.
2. Field-First Design, Not Desk-First
She saw that standard EHRs were built for office workflows, not for nurses driving from home visit to home visit, juggling high-acuity caseloads on mobile devices. Coordinista flips that: one field care delivery platform and mobile app designed around notifications, queues, calendars, maps, and services for nurses in motion.
Lioness lesson: Design around the people who move, not the people who sit.
3. Decentralized Execution, Centralized Clarity
Coordinista enables centralized coordination with decentralized execution so health plans and providers can orchestrate telephonic, virtual, and in-person services while nurses do the work where patients actually live.
Lioness lesson: The pride hunts best when each lioness can move independently—but the strategy is shared.
4. Data as a Shield, Not a Weapon
Cindy’s platform doesn’t just track visits; it generates data and analytics on how to best deploy limited clinical resources—which services, which patients, which neighborhoods. That means better outcomes and better justification for nurse-led models in boardrooms that often undervalue them.
Lioness lesson: Use data to protect your people and your mission—not to bury them in reports.
5. Partnerships that Multiply Impact
Her partnership with Avail Health plugs Coordinista into a larger nurse-led, value-based model, enabling mobile primary care in underserved communities and reinforcing a buckling primary care system. Two nurse-led companies, both founded by people who know the pain from the inside, banding together.
Lioness lesson: The pride grows stronger when lionesses ally with other lionesses who share the mission.
FIVE ACTION MOVES TO “LEAD LIKE CINDY” IN YOUR WORLD
You don’t have to be in healthcare to use this. Here’s how to translate her playbook into your arena:
Write a “CEO Letter” to Yourself
Audit Your Frontline Tools
Find the 30% Opportunity
Turn a Layoff/Setback into a Launchpad
Pursue Real-World Validation, Not Just Vibes
CONCLUSION
Cindy Bauer doesn’t fit the cliché “tech founder” mold.
She’s a nurse. A field operator. A systems architect for human dignity.
She watched broken processes chew up clinicians and spit out patients into ERs that should’ve been avoided. Instead of numbing out, she built Coordinista so nurses could deliver better care with less chaos—and then she went and proved it in competitions, accelerators, and strategic partnerships.
That’s Lioness leadership:
Start with the wound.
Turn it into a system.
Scale it with courage, data, and alliances.
If you’re a woman leading anything right now—team, startup, department, movement—Cindy’s story is your reminder:
You don’t need permission. You need proof, partners, and pride.
HASHTAGS
#LeadLikeALioness #CindyBauer #Coordinista #NurseFounder #WomenInHealthTech #LionessLeadership #FemaleFounders #ValueBasedCare #MobileCare #BullishOnBusiness
RESOURCES & AUTHORITY LINKS
Today’s Authority Sources (Topic Links)
Coordinista CEO Letter & Origin Story
Coordinista Company & Funding Profile
TCNewTech Pitch Competition Win
Coordinista–Avail Health Strategic Partnership
Cindy’s Public Founder Profile & Nursing Background
Books
Charge Like a Bull – https://a.co/d/hF64gYh
Lead Like a Lioness – https://a.co/d/hwEIYnk
Masterminds
Freedom Circle Mastermind https://the-freedom-circle-z2x92y5.gamma.site/
EB-2/EB-5 Business Immigration Mastermind https://www.bullishonbusiness.com/pricing-plans/list
Podcast
Bullish on Business Podcast https://youtube.com/playlist?
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