Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Jeff Richards, COO of SnapNurse (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is the primary use case for your offering like the Uber of nursing?

Jeff Richards: We heard that many times when we first started our company. We had heard those comparisons that it is a type of Uber for nurses. There is something missing in that description though. When you order an Uber, you have no choice about who your driver is. That does not fundamentally work in healthcare.

As a hospital, long-term care facility, or medical clinic, you absolutely need to know and care about who you are getting. You need to have a nurse with a certain amount of experience and they need to have the correct specialty. They also need to have certification. You also have to validate their license and run background checks. There is, however, an ease of use that is like Uber.

The way that we built the user interface allows for the facility manager to have a ton of discretion over who they are picking. That interface is what drives their ability to select them quickly. The rest of it is the way in which we source, recruit, onboard, and deploy them. 

Sramana Mitra: On the recruiting supply side, you recruit people that then do background checks and organize them by skills and then you do some amount of matchmaking. 

Jeff Richards: That is exactly right. 

Sramana Mitra: What is the problem? What is exactly going on? Can you give us a bit more color on what is the problem with nurse shortage and nurse provisioning deployment?

Jeff Richards: Even before COVID, there was a critical nurse shortage. Nearly 66% of hospitals were operating without adequate staff. Now with COVID, this has significantly increased even more. A big part of the problem is not so much that there is a shortage overall of healthcare professionals. The correct professional or the specific specialties needed and the amounts needed weren’t available in that specific area.

That problem is where our platform has stepped in. We connect the right providers who are pre-vetted, credentialed, and sourced and make them available for facilities to book them. When we first started before COVID, we accumulated about 10,000 healthcare providers on our platform. In February 2020, we had a little over 10,000. Today, we have over 150,000.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve added 140,000 providers. We have achieved a network effect at this point. We deliberately went out, sourced, and recruited based on demand from clients. We had more nurses than we needed because we were rapidly scaling the platform. Now, we have accumulated well over 1,000 clients and 150,000 nurses. The marketplace itself is accelerating beyond our own marketing efforts, which often happens with companies when they reach that critical inflection point where you get the network effect.

In this case, you have enough on the provider side that there is a brand awareness of SnapNurse and knowledge about how the platform works. This is the same on the facility side where they have trust in the brand because there is enough awareness of it, and other clients are using it. We have reached that place in the last three months. We have definitely hit the network effect and are seeing an expansion even beyond our marketing efforts on both sides of the marketplace. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Jeff Richards, COO of SnapNurse
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