Across the country, healthcare facilities are struggling to tread water as the nurse shortage grows in severity. The current shortage has the industry scrambling to find an additional 1.2 million nurses to meet growing patient demand. This workforce crisis is intersecting with – and fueling – an industry-wide talent drain. Nursing schools are not producing enough nurses, and many career nurses are choosing to retire early or fleeing the profession entirely, leaving those who remain feeling unsupported and burned out.
Too many health systems have become overly-reliant on staffing agencies to fill shifts. This trend has led to billions of dollars spent on labor costs every year – a price tag no health system can afford, but one many feel is a temporary necessity. In reality, the recent flight from the clinical workforce has created latent pools of qualified local talent around every healthcare facility. With a little practical technology, hospitals and health systems can access these talent pools to reduce labor costs, fill shifts on demand, and build the contingent workforce of the future.
CareRev’s technology platform provides hospitals and health systems with a direct line to local, qualified healthcare professionals looking for flexible opportunities – opportunities that allow them to treat patients in their own communities. Technology-enabled staffing solutions like CareRev prioritize the needs of healthcare professionals today’s nurses while simultaneously helping healthcare facilities fill shifts without relying on expensive contract labor.
In a recent webinar, CareRev founder Will Patterson chatted with healthcare leaders on the critical need to leverage technology to address healthcare’s mounting staffing woes.
CareRev’s healthcare staffing technology battles burnout
Moderator: Elizabeth Whitehead, Managing Editor, U.S. News & World Report:
“We have a stressed out workforce. Nurses want more flexibility and are at different points in their career. Some may want to be floating nurses, or you have a staff that needs to have: time off, but you've got nobody to back them up. So we have to create these floating workforces. But having traveling nurses causes resentment because of their higher salaries. Can you weigh in on that?”
Will Patterson, CareRev founder:
“A lot of the people we see working in these really flexible roles are the retired individuals. They’ll go to Europe for one month. They'll come back, they’ll work. But you know the thing I'm proud of is that we've been able to keep them in the industry. That's our main focus as a company: how do we keep these folks in the industry? These made-career folks are thinking about doing other careers. The new grads can't. I'm talking to new grads who are already talking about leaving nursing in a year.
And so It's really about touching these people's wants and desires. We have people creating LLCs and C corps and starting [inaudible] businesses. There are entrepreneurs here. That's where the labor's at.
Going on to healthcare systems, continuity of care, and creating flexible pools on travel, I’ll be frank: travel nursing makes zero sense whatsoever. You're taking one population in a city and you're moving it to another one, you're taking that population in the city and moving it to another one, and the only folks that gain from that are large staffing agencies who've been living in this model for the last twenty years.
When we're working with healthcare systems, they’re asking how do we access this local labor force? How do we get people who want to work? You have to have technology. Not only are we short on the nursing side but we're also short on the operations side, we’re short on the human resources side, we're short everywhere. You can't have a bunch of folks using Google sheets and telephones and text messaging and emailing to schedule a thousand people for an average of 6.7 shifts [per month]. The repetitive tasks will be done with technology.”
The benefits of CareRev
With CareRev, your hospital or health system, outpatient center, or skilled nursing facility can take advantage of a direct line to local clinical talent and per diem nurses with our SaaS-based solution.
From onboarding healthcare professionals, to managing compliance, to scheduling with ease, CareRev:
- provides access to an overlooked local talent pool curated to your facility’s needs
- reduces your labor costs
- partners to help you build the resilient, flexible healthcare workforce of the future
Access the full webinar now to learn more.
