Health IT, Startups

Here’s how entrepreneurs are trying to solve healthcare’s HR challenges

Entrepreneurs are taking different approaches to making physician recruitment easier and more cost effective from filling shifts to checking and organizing physician credentials.

By Stephanie Baum on November 18, 2016

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There has been a wide range of opinions of just how dire the doctor and nurse shortage is or will be and how to address it. Although recruitment firms do the heavy lifting of vetting and identifying suitable candidates for temporary and permanent vacancies, the service can come with a hefty price tag. Some entrepreneurs see opportunities to disrupt the status quo.

Healthcare entrepreneur Liam Foster, a student in public health at the University of Pennsylvania via Aberdeen, Scotland, came up with an idea for an app designed to support doctors who just want to take an extra shift now and again. He called it Moonly. It was one of a handful of app ideas selected by developers at the Penn Center for Innovation’s fourth annual AppITUP competition this week at the University City Science Center in Philadelphia.

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Foster’s rationale is this. Even when a hospital’s HR reaches out to physicians within one hospital, there is still the whirlwind of emails to contend with. Assuming more than one physician is interested in some extra work, there’s still all the back and forth emails necessary to ensure they have the best doctor for the shift. Foster envisions an approach that would improve the efficiency of this process. He would also add a rating tool to the equation to make it easier to make these decisions. One of the developers judging the event liked what it heard. Foster will be working with Offshorent to develop his app a reality in the run up to the finals for AppITUp next year.

At least one other company has detected a need to address the moonlighting physicians in healthcare as well. Moonlighting Solutions based in Greensboro, North Carolina is one of the more established players in this space and goes back to 2007.

Here are some other startups that see an opportunity to improve the status quo in healthcare professional recruitment.

Nomad is a New York City-based based business that wants to match clinicians with healthcare facilities looking to fill short-term clinical vacancies. Led by CEO  and Co-founder Alexi Nazem, the business wants to cut out brokers in favor of greater billing transparency and lower commissions. An algorithm matches hospitals’ needs with the most qualified clinicians based on licensing, dates available, specialty, and location, and other criteria. The company is currently in beta and closed a Series A round in July.

RampUp Nursing The founders of this business decided that the recruitment process is broken when it comes to healthcare. The company is an outgrowth of a similar business fulfilling health IT, medical device, and pharma recruitment needs. In an interview with MedCity News earlier this year the co-founders described how the business works. Nurses describe the opportunities they seek, including precepting, locum tenens, telemedicine, and travel nursing. Requests from employers are submitted through the RampUp platform. The company only gives out nurses information if they are interested in a position in a bid to provide a spam-free service.

Silversheet Former Everyday Health CEO Miles Beckett founded this medical credentialing service to help healthcare facilities organize and track credentials, support compliance and verify primary sources. It helps them make the task of assembling credentials more manageable. The company’s services also support verification and sanction checks.

CredSimple offers a few different approaches to checking physician credentials. Delegated credentialing, for example, targets health plans that delegate credentialing of providers to hospitals, independent practice associations or other provider groups. The service also monitors providers added to CredSimple for federal and state-level sanctions and board actions, according to the company’s website. To support business relationships, it helps users track rate codes and contracts with multiple organizations. The company also helps healthcare facilities prepare for medical committee reviews.