Imagine you oversee staffing for a healthcare clinic. You get a text from one of your nurses: “Have a fever. Sorry, I can’t come in tomorrow.” Now, you have less than 24 hours to find a replacement.
Rather than panicking, you tap the Nursa app on your phone. Within a few hours, you’re able to post the shift, fill it with a qualified RN, and have peace of mind that the clinic won’t skip a beat the next day.
Say you’re on the other end of that transaction and you’re an RN looking to pick up a few extra shifts. You get a notification on your Nursa app about a shift opening at a nearby clinic tomorrow. You submit for the job and get a confirmation that you’re accepted within a couple of hours. You’ll be able to make a little more than your regular nursing position during those eight hours—and keep saving for that family trip next month.
Nursa has developed this platform—one that solves healthcare facilities’ per diem staffing needs while providing flexible, well-paying employment opportunities for nurses (specifically LPNs, RNs, and CNAs).
A love for supply-chain compression sparks something new
While its tech has empowered Nursa to become a kind of Match.com for nursing, co-founder and CEO Curtis Anderson didn’t necessarily start with the intent to disrupt the medical staffing industry.
“My background’s in software,” Anderson says. “I saw an opportunity to purchase a traditional staffing agency, and then we saw an opportunity for tech to compress the space…The modest way to describe it is two customers with two sets of problems and trying to get that to align at just the right moment or just the right frequency.”
Since Nursa started operating along the Wasatch Front right before the pandemic hit in 2020, the Murray-based company has grown to work with clinicians and facilities in 17 states.
A catalyst for Nursa’s growth is the turnkey simplicity (via app or desktop) the app provides both facilities and clinicians. “It’s a frictionless entry—a clinician can sign up, or a building can sign up in a self-serve capacity,” Anderson says. “On the clinical side of the fence, we look for a certain subset of information. Then, you can request to be able to fulfill jobs. On the facility side, we’re looking to understand what needs you have, so again—a certain subset of information gets you through that front door.
“The clinician requests a job that’s available, the facility responds to that request. We enable the interaction with some general insurance policies to de-risk the situation for both parties. Once the shift is complete, both parties leave a two-way blind review, meaning both parties contribute information before we show the information to either side. There’s a review process, then we rinse and repeat.”
Better pay, lower costs
As for clinicians—who range in age from 16 to 84, with most in the Millennial demographic—the benefits of finding shifts through Nursa are competitive pay, flexibility, and a regular, short pay cycle. Anderson noted that while pay varies by market, Nursa shifts can pay as much as double what clinicians make in full-time positions in some markets. Both parties verify the hours after the shifts are complete, and clinicians get paid the following Friday.
Anderson says facilities enjoy a greater sense of security and lower costs with Nursa. They’re billed only for the shifts that Nursa fills based on net-30 terms, with no exclusive contracts. “The facility only pays for what they need. If we fill it, they pay for it,” Anderson says. “Outside of that, we don’t have exclusive contracts. Traditional staffing agencies often work on a contract basis, but Nursa is focused on per diem staffing without contracts.”
In most cases, Anderson says, Nursa is marginally to significantly cheaper than an agency. “In the broader prospect, we’re also billing substantially more volume as far as what their needs are in comparison to an agency because manually filling holes for tomorrow,” he continues. “You can burn out a service-based staff really quickly. So doing that with tech is a fantastic thing.”
Making things seamless
To Anderson’s point, Nursa’s platform enables quick turnaround on otherwise stressful last-minute staffing. Over the last six months, just over 40 percent of the shifts Nursa facilitated went from initial listing to having a clinician on-site in less than 24 hours. “It’s as near real-time as you get in medical,” Anderson says.
Another headache that Nursa solves for facilities? Vetting professional qualifications and matching relevant candidates. “In the sign-up process, we gather a nursing license or a CNA certification,” Anderson says. “The building determines what the remainder of that compliance looks like, which the clinician contributes—and they can store all that information in the app.
Then, Nursa does pattern matching on the backend to determine whether it’s a good compliance match or not. “We show the building the degree to which they are compliant–the items they have, the items they don’t have,” Anderson says. “Then the building can ultimately make a decision: if the need is great enough and they want to offset their own ruleset, or if they only want to look at the clinicians that are 100 percent compliant. We’re trying to ensure that the toolset and the transparency are available for both sides.”
It’s about the patients
Alongside Anderson’s passions for tech and supply-chain compression, he’s equally proud of Nursa’s broader mission. “Holistically, for us, this is about improving patient care and getting clinicians to bedsides that might not have had clinicians,” he says.
A case study on Nursa’s website illustrates its impact. When Covid hit, Legacy Village in Provo faced sudden staffing shortages. Within a few hours, the facility was able to schedule its first 48 shifts, and over the next two weeks, Legacy Village scheduled a total of 93 shifts. “This gave their staff the time they needed to recover and get back to work. It also gave local clinicians the opportunity to help their community by picking up these Covid jobs,” the website reads.
For both facilities and clinicians, having a tech-based matchmaker for last-minute staffing needs is a significant breakthrough. Considering the patients who also benefit, it’s a beautiful happily-ever-after story.