Dive Brief:
- Pivot Health, a new Seattle-based healthcare startup, emerged out of stealth mode on Tuesday, MobiHealthNews reported.
- The company intends to use technology to help clinicians find jobs faster than before. The company is currently focusing its offerings on the West Coast, but plans to expand operations nationwide.
- “On average it takes more than four months for a clinician to change jobs or for a hospital to find talent — and that is the longest time to fill for pretty much any industry,” founder Simon Frey was quoted in MobiHealthNews, adding, “Those inefficiencies are costing healthcare organizations in terms of the quality of care they’re able to deliver as well as impacting reimbursements and increasing the administrative costs of hiring.”
Dive Insight:
Hospitals and healthcare organizations find themselves in quite a quandary these days when it comes to their workforce.
On one hand, softening reimbursements and admissions have led some providers to reconsider their budget, resulting with some having to make the tough decision to lay off employees. On the other hand, the aging population and a large number of clinical workers on the edge of retirement is creating an environment where healthcare services will be in more demand. Thus, more clinical providers will be needed to serve these incoming baby boomers, who are likely to have more chronic diseases.
Healthcare practitioners and healthcare support positions are expected to be among the fastest growing jobs from 2014 to 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One profession in this cohort that will be needed is registered nurses, one of the jobs predicted to be in shortage in the coming years.
Entrepreneurs have noticed the interacting levers of the supply-and-demand for healthcare labor and see an opportunity. Pivot Health, for example, is capitalizing on the pending nursing shortage by currently focusing its product on registered nurses, nurse practitioners as well as physician assistants. With nursing training programs being created to offset a shortage of such professionals, graduates will need to find a job. Pivot Health is hoping to be a streamlined platform to ease nurses' transition into a new career.
Other companies, such as Nomad Health, take different angles on the new healthcare labor environment. Nomad acts as a clinical marketplace for freelance clinical jobs, including physicians and nurses. "If you're at all familiar with the practices for recruitment in healthcare, they're very outdated and cumbersome," Nomad Health CEO and co-founder Alexi Nazem recently told Healthcare Dive. He added that the company wants to expand services to advanced practice providers such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants and ultimately get involved in other areas of healthcare recruitment cycles, such as fulltime hiring.
Nomad and Pivot are both banking on technology to help streamline job recruitment processes for healthcare organizations. With clinical hiring expected to continue to grow, the companies could find competition among their markets.