NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nomad Health, which operates the first online marketplace for freelance healthcare jobs, today announced that it is expanding its digital platform to nurses. One year after raising a $4 million Series A round and launching its doctor marketplace, Nomad Health is now bringing its cutting-edge technology to bear on the nation’s critical nursing shortage, making it the first online platform for short-term nurse staffing. Starting in Texas today and soon nationwide, nurses can now use Nomad to find short-term clinical work in hospitals and health systems, officially bringing the nursing profession into the modern gig economy.
“Until Nomad, hiring in healthcare was broken. It was expensive, slow and opaque. We have made great progress on changing the dynamic for hiring doctors, and we are excited today to expand Nomad to millions of nurses across the United States so we can get to work solving nurse shortages,” said Dr. Alexi Nazem, CEO and Co-Founder of Nomad Health.
Founded in 2015 in New York City by a team of doctors and leading technologists, Nomad Health is simplifying the $15 billion temporary healthcare staffing industry in the United States. Severe doctor and nurse shortages are causing medical employers to rely heavily on short-term clinicians, but the staffing industry has been dominated for decades by middleman brokers who add costs and delays. Nomad Health streamlines healthcare hiring by removing third party recruitment brokers and directly connecting clinicians to medical employers. The platform reduces costs, increases hiring quality and speeds up the entire process for both sides of the healthcare marketplace. The expansion to nurses will allow Nomad Health to serve a significant new segment of the temporary healthcare staffing market. Travel nursing alone represents 20% of that market, and demand is expected to increase substantially in coming years due to the worsening nurse shortage in the United States.
There is expected to be a shortage of 1.2 million Registered Nurses by 2022.1 This is driven chiefly by the aging Baby Boomer generation, which will be larger and sicker than any generation in American history. By 2030, 69 million Boomers will be elderly2 -- more than twice the elderly population today -- and they will carry a higher burden of chronic disease than previous generations.3 Further exacerbating the problem is the fact that one third of the 3.5 million active nurses today are themselves older than 50 years, and by the year 2024, an estimated 700,000 nurses are anticipated to retire from the labor force.4
“As the population ages, the pressures put on our healthcare systems and clinicians will soar,” said Kevin Ryan, Nomad Health’s Chairman and Co-Founder. “It should be much easier to hire high quality nurses to address patient needs, and Nomad is providing an innovative digital solution to do just that.”
Whenever patient demand exceeds the available full-time staff, healthcare organizations rely on travel nurses from across the country to step in and provide coverage. But finding, hiring and managing travel nurses is expensive and inefficient in the broker-driven market of today. By contrast, Nomad Health drives efficiency by replacing every broker function with modern technology. Applications, credentialing, payments, malpractice insurance and more are all handled promptly online. These efficiency gains mean that Nomad Health can offer higher pay rates to nurses, while still saving employers up to 30% per nursing hire.
Nomad Health launches its nursing marketplace today in Texas. Texas is one of the most understaffed healthcare markets in the country5 and the largest state in the Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC), which allows nurses with an NLC license to practice in any of the 25 NLC states. After launching in Texas, Nomad Health will rapidly roll out its freelance nursing product to states across the country throughout 2017 and 2018, mirroring the fast growth of its doctor market which launched in 2016 and is now live in 14 states.
“We built Nomad to make healthcare hiring simple so that doctors, nurses, hospitals and clinics can focus on what matters most: taking care of patients,” said Dr. Nazem, a Harvard and Yale trained internal medicine doctor. “Based on the great enthusiasm we’ve seen to date from nurses and doctors, it looks like Nomad is just the right dose of technology the industry needed.”
About Nomad Health
Nomad Health is a technology company that is simplifying the $15 billion temporary healthcare staffing industry. The company has built the first online marketplace that enables clinicians and the institutions that hire them to find each other and transact directly, without a broker. Nomad Health brings substantial cost savings, dynamic pricing, and a streamlined process to both sides of the market. Nomad is simple, modern healthcare staffing. Learn more at nomadhealth.com.
____________________
1 Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. Employment Projections 2014-24: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecopro.pdf
2 National Institutes of Health. The 2030 Problem: Caring for Aging Baby Boomers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1464018/
3 King et al. JAMA Internal Medicine 2013. http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1568518
4 Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. Employment Projections 2014-24: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecopro.pdf
5 Texas Organization of Nurse Executives. The Texas Nursing Shortage - Condition Critical: http://www.texasnurse.org/?44
