Startups

Nurse-staffing platform Incredible Health raises $15M

Incredible Health, based in San Francisco, has worked with customers like Stanford Healthcare, UCSF Medical Center, Cedars Sinai Medical Center and many others to fill their nursing staffing needs.

A trained but nonpracticing physician, Iman Abuzeid, got an earful from friends and family members – many of whom also are doctors – stemming from their frustrations over the understaffing of registered nurses plaguing hospitals and medical systems nationwide.

“The shortage of nurses has been around for a long time and is progressively getting worse,” Abuzeid said in a recent phone interview.

She sought to resolve the issue by starting a health care hiring platform — Incredible Health — about a year and a half ago along with cofounder MIT alum Rome Portlock, CTO. The San Francisco startup enables hospitals and medical systems to hire nurses in under 30 days. That’s three times faster than the national average. Already active in California, the platform has more than 150 customers currently hiring nurses using it, she noted.

On Thursday, Incredible Health raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from, among others, NFX, Obvious Ventures and Precursor Ventures. The $15 million round brings Incredible Health’s total funding to $17 million.

Having more than 150 customers — the website notest hospitals like Stanford Healthcare, Rady Children’s Hospital, UCSF Medical Center, Cedars Sinai and Tenet Healthcare as users — matters because a facility’s level of efficiency increases by 55 times with additional staffing, Abuzeid said.

“Understaffing’s a number one problem for hospitals and health systems; it affects the quality of care and financials,” she added.

In fact, an additional 203,700 new registered nurses (RNs) each year through 2026 will be needed to fill newly created positions and to replace retiring nurses, according to The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Projections 2016-2026, stated on the website of American Association of Colleges of Nursing. One million RNs will retire by 2030, researchers project.

This shortage, combined with the financial shot-in-the-arm Incredible Health just received, maybe an indication that Abuzeid and Portlock appear to be onto something. The money was raised in less than four weeks, declared Abuzeid.

“The top tier of venture capital firms were all interested. We were in the position of being selective.”

 The funds will be used in many ways including product improvement and expansion nationwide, she continued. The company currently has 32 employees

“We want to take the offering across the country as fast as we can because the rest of the country needs it,” she said

 The money also will be earmarked to hire additional software engineers, marketers, sales reps and account managers, both at company headquarters in San Francisco and nationwide, she noted.

Incredible Health is not operating in a vacuum without competitors. There are companies like Nurse Recruiter and job boards on LinkedIn and Indeed. But Abuzeid dismissed the latter as time-consuming and arduous.

“Job boards (are a matter of) quantity over quality. Yes, a lot of applicants come through, but an employer has to manually sift through all of that to hire” she said.

Then there’s the fact that, unlike the Incredible Health platform, which is customized to the healthcare industry, legacy boards cover a wide span of industries, she explained. The problem with that?

“Health care and hospitals are both very nuanced, so when it comes to hiring, their needs are very unique” since, for one thing, they’re all regulated professions.”

With that in mind, through automation, Incredible Health screens variables such as licensing, certifications and experience while custom matching provides each employer and potential hire a personalized experience

Because of this array of technological components applied by the platform, which Abuzeid said “can’t be overestimated,” in the long run, she doesn’t envision the field of viable competitors to significantly burgeon.

“Figuring out how to automatically screen the talent in a way that you’re delivering high-quality talent and how to customize the matching algorithm, which we’ve done, isn’t a trivial exercise,” she said.

Photo: asiseei, Getty Images,

 

 

 

 

 

 

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