JR: No one person or agency can understand the distinct needs of all our healthcare settings. Healthcare is just too complex.

If we stick with the agency model of recruiting, everyone is missing some of the picture, and some of the remaining picture is distorted. Nurses want to know all of the available jobs—and they want to be able to filter immediately on the basis of location, acuity, geography, timeframe, whatever criteria matters most to them. And hospitals should want their postings to go to the largest pool of nurses seeking work. When a nurse’s skills, acuity, and experience have been analyzed and matched with a hospital’s or clinic’s needs, then they absolutely will talk to someone—but they don’t have to talk to someone to get to that point.

HCB News: You said part of the picture was “distorted.” What did you mean?

JR: If you talk to CNOs and CHROs, or anyone in charge of staffing a unit or service, you’ll hear that clinical mismatch is a huge problem. Recruiters don’t always know or understand all the highly specialized skills and requirements for working in all the different clinical settings, so they regularly send nurses that aren’t the right match. It happens all the time in acute care. And while that’s a real disappointment for the nurse, who of course wants to provide excellent care, and wants to be competent and effective, the consequences are even worse for the hospital. Clinical mismatch is a real drain on morale. And it also escalates risk to the patient, which can expose the hospital to greater liability.

HCB News: What’s the alternative?
JR: The alternative? Doing what every other industry—retail, entertainment, transportation, banking, you name it—has done or is on the process of doing: Using technology to address the time-consuming, repetitive tasks that kill efficiency and drive mismatch. This can be achieved by building a platform-based marketplace, in this case for clinical services and clinical needs. By enabling things like self-service, efficient search functions, and powerful filtering capability, technology can compress the timeline to delivery and provide the sustainable staffing solution of the future.

HCB News: Even a perfect staffing platform can’t change the total number of nurses at work in the country, though. SnapNurse may help hospitals deal with their demand for nurses, but is there a plan for increasing the supply?
JR: The longer-term solution is to educate about a million nurses, but that's a four-year process just for schooling and another 1-2 years of precepting and bedside training. And that’s if you started today. At the end of those four years, you’d need enough educational institutions and/or private hospitals to absorb those candidates, including the preceptors who can help transform brand-new graduates into skilled specialty nurses, where our greatest needs lie.

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