Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Jeff Richards, COO of SnapNurse (Part 1)

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There’s an acute nurse shortage in the United States. SnapNurse works in IT-enabled provisioning and payment.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well SnapNurse.

Jeff Richards: I am the Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of SnapNurse and Paymint. SnapNurse was founded in 2016 to address the critical nurse shortage across the United States. This is still a problem. SnapNurse is the first and only tech-enabled platform that facilitates medical staffing in just 24-48 hours.

We are based here in Atlanta, Georgia. Our team has grown to more than 200 employees. We have over 150,000 medical professionals registered on the platform. Paymint is our proprietary payment platform that enables nurses and medical professionals to get paid at the end of their shift. 

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click down a little bit and explain the workflow. Are these temp nurses who are getting paid on a shift basis?

Jeff Richards: It can be. We sometimes relocate nurses from one place to another. Of course, during COVID that accelerated significantly. It can be PRN meaning that it can be one shift here and one shift there. There is also a sub-component to travel that is often referred to as rapid response. That is the value proposition that we excel at in an extraordinary way.

Because of the software platform, we are able to source, onboard, and deploy nurses in 24 to 48 hours in large quantities. We have deployed up to a thousand nurses within that time frame. This was a demand that the industry had never seen before. We stepped into that demand and used our software to make that happen.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some use cases of where your software is used and what kind of problems it is specifically addressing.

Jeff Richards: Even before COVID, the biggest problem was that there was a nurse staffing shortage. It isn’t just the fact that there is a shortage. It’s a shortage in having the right nurses with the right specialty placed in the right part of the country. It is almost like a redeployment problem as much as it is a nurse staffing shortage. There are enough nurses most of the time. There just aren’t enough nurses in the right specialties in the right location.

That problem is custom-made for a staffing agency. The challenge is that the need grew dramatically. The strength of our software is in rapid sourcing and deployment. The way that we source, recruit, and onboard has a level of automation that can be compared to an Uber or Amazon model. We can handle large numbers of nurses with different specialties.

We have automated enough of that where we are able to turn around the numbers that are needed in a short period of time, typically within 24 to 48 hours. Traditional staffing companies which are also in the business of redeploying staff typically take 10 to 14 days to get someone sourced, recruited, onboarded, and then deployed. They just lag behind, especially within the last 12 months of COVID.

This had an enormous disruption on healthcare all over the country. Everybody knows. We have all lived through it. Here is the United States, this is what we have done. Our software has enabled us to turn the nurses around much rapidly at a larger scale than any other company.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Jeff Richards, COO of SnapNurse
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