Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Jeff Richards, COO of SnapNurse (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you look around at the ecosystem, what are the open problems from where you sit? Is this nurse shortage problem something that is escalating or is it getting better because people are getting into nursing?

One of the conversations that we have had with some of our previous guests is that there are professions that are getting slaughtered like retail and hospitality. There are movements from those professions into healthcare. Is that something that you are seeing? What is your assessment of that? 

Jeff Richards: To become a nurse, it’s a 2 to 4-year degree depending on the skill level. Whatever happens, it’s a 2 to 4-year process to educate a nurse and that is just the beginning. Once a nurse gets their degree, they need to spend 1 to 3 years in some of the basic training on the surgical units, on the floor, or in clinics to reinforce what they learn at school. They need to acquire and accumulate clinical expertise and knowledge to add to their practice capacity.

Those desires, changes, and the movement from one industry to another is going to take 2 to 4 years to turn around. In the meantime, the demand is extraordinary. A lot of that is driven by COVID and it will be there for at least 2 to 4 years. During that time, a platform like ours will absolutely continue to expand and thrive. Even as more nurses move into the workforce, you are going to have a huge wave of retirees.

That is part of where the original challenge came from 2015 to 2017, the beginning of baby boomers retiring. As they retire and continue to exit, we need another wave of nurses to go through school and then come out and practice. Whether they take a full-time job, part-time job, PRN, or travel, our goal is for them to join our platform and have a lot of opportunities to practice. 

Sramana Mitra: If you were starting a new company today in this general area, what would you do? I am not talking about SnapNurse. I am talking about something new. I am talking about putting an entrepreneur’s hat on and looking for new problems in the healthcare IT space that needs to be solved.

Jeff Richards: There are many aspects of nurse education. Many hospitals won’t hire nurses straight out of nursing school or at least they won’t let them go into the specialty areas. I would create a non-profit and work with hospitals to facilitate the means by which nurses can get that clinical training. It would be some combination of getting a huge network of hospitals that will commit to taking nurses straight out of school.

The nurses would likely want their student loans paid off so they would commit to doing that by staying a certain number of years. There is a huge gap between what happens after nursing school. That is a giant opportunity. It would probably be in the form of a non-profit. It doesn’t have to be.

It would be connecting with all the nursing schools and ensuring that you have tremendous partnerships with hospitals to enable those new nurses to get clinical education so that they can contribute more value right away or much more quickly than what often happens now. It is not a clear pathway after school and there is a huge gap there in the market that can be solved by an entrepreneur by founding a non-profit or a profit company to solve that. 

Sramana Mitra: I think I understand what you are doing. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Jeff Richards, COO of SnapNurse
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