UPMC Enterprises, the innovation and venture capital arm of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, announced Wednesday that it has made a strategic investment in VeloSource, a healthcare workforce solutions provider based in St. Louis, Missouri. The company plans to use the investment to expand its AI-enabled platform called Syncx, which is designed to help health systems manage clinician staffing.
The investment comes as healthcare organizations continue to face mounting physician shortages. The federal Health Resources & Services Administration projects that the U.S. will face a shortage of 141,160 full-time physicians by 2038. According to UPMC Enterprises around 56,000 physicians currently work as locum tenens to temporarily fill staffing gaps, and they predict that number will only grow.
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“Workforce staffing and cost is one of the biggest challenges to healthcare nationwide,” said Nick Shapiro, vice president at UPMC Enterprises, in an email. “We believe that UPMC can bring the real-world expertise to further develop the Syncx technology into an attractive solution for other health systems seeking to provide the best care to their patients.”
The Missouri company declined to disclose the financial terms of the investment. Under the agreement, Richard Wadas, MD, a UPMC emergency physician and vice president of community and ambulatory services and network development at UPMC, will become the chief medical officer at VeloSource, and UPMC Enterprises will also hold a seat on VeloSource’s board of directors.
Pittsburgh-based UPMC is a healthcare provider and insurer which operates more than 40 hospitals and hundreds of outpatient locations, according to Shapiro. The organization has already used Syncx to help manage its physician and advanced practice provider workforce.
“For us, this was our first real foray into the use of AI for workforce management,” said Wadas in an email. “It has been useful in not only identifying potential physicians to fill staffing needs, but also to aid us in managing the various metrics that we desired to track as a measure of success.”
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Wadas added that the AI-powered staffing platform allows UPMC to coordinate care in a more cost-effective way while maintaining a high-quality standard of care.
For example, the platform has given UPMC the ability to track time worked by a physician and identify areas for potential future deployment or permanent recruitment. The partnership will focus on expanding automation to identify available clinicians and anticipate future staffing needs, Wadas said.
Looking ahead, he hopes that by further developing the Syncx platform, UPMC and other health systems, as well as their patients, might benefit from the ability to more seamlessly address staffing needs.
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