Healthcare Staffing in the Age of the Apprenticeship Economy
By: Jeff Diamond & Aaron Szekel
Much has been written about the dire staffing situation across the healthcare industry, as hospital systems, research organizations, and medical practices struggle to recruit, motivate, upskill, and retain healthcare professionals, especially nurses and non-clinical workers. With the introduction of the gig economy, overworked and underpaid healthcare workers have more options than ever before for alternative means of income (often with better hours and better pay). As such, loyalty to employers, and to the industry, is at an all-time low.
What healthcare employers seem to be missing is that today’s workers are prioritizing the acquisition of new skills and education before entering, or reentering, the job market — at minimal cost. They want careers and a clear line-of-site for career growth. A four-year college education is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of Americans. Most nurses and non-clinical healthcare staff do not require “liberal arts” degrees and these workers are seeking alternative means of obtaining the skills necessary to accelerate their growth up the career ladder, while, as mentioned, keeping their costs down. Herein lies the opportunity for healthcare organizations to embrace a new-age apprenticeship model, one that prioritizes early and continuous education, the ability to have impact, competitive compensation, and the opportunity for upskilling as a means to attract and retain talent.
We believe the next decade will be defined as the return to an Apprenticeship Economy. For many nurses and non-clinical healthcare workers, recruitment already begins during high school as hospital systems like UCLA are offering students introductory medical education programs and summer camps. Thus, apprenticeships will not be restricted to those already in the workforce, but will open the doors to anyone who wants to intern or apprentice at a younger age, giving them pathways to a career. Given the technical expertise required for most healthcare positions, an apprenticeship model at an early age not only reduces the need and cost of higher education, but it allows for acceleration based on one’s skillset and the ability to have immediate impact on a patient’s well-being. Couple that with the ability to upskill as an apprentice, and to learn different parts of a hospital and healthcare system, and we suddenly create a healthcare system that attracts and retains the right talent. It will behoove healthcare organizations to leverage programs that prioritize recruitment, professional assessment, and upskilling as whoever is the best at retaining and attracting top talent will withstand the test of time.
Next Generation Tech-Enabled Staffing Platforms
At Fika, we are constantly seeking to find the next generation of tech-enabled staffing platforms in healthcare. We believe that platforms focusing on candidate recruitment and retainment through training and upskilling offer the most compelling wedge as these solutions improve diversity, create loyalty, and lay the foundation for long-term relationship building.
Our most recent investment, a company that is still in stealth and will be announced in the coming months, is a top-of-funnel management platform for health systems to track and engage Allied health talent. The company focuses on key needs for medtech workers and hospital HR teams via resources such as candidate engagement and tracking, career modeling, and eLearning. Ultimately, what excites us most is the core foundational apprenticeship elements that this platform is building, a new type of recruitment training engine that tests and trains for knowledge, and which will offer support to the worker and to the health organizations by offering continuous ways for both to make a positive impact on lives.
We envision this to be a three-pronged hybrid model: recruitment and training, a labor marketplace, and shift management.
Recruitment & Training
As discussed above, the company we recently invested in is attacking this model in the Allied health space first via recruitment and education, and laying the foundation for expanding its product offering to encapsulate the other two elements of the hybrid model. There are other notable companies continuing to emerge across healthcare that are providing the tools to continue to engage populations of workers and provide education as a lever for talent acquisition and retention. Flint offers recruiting, licensing, immigration, and relocation services to nurses coming from abroad. Apploi provides recruiting, onboarding, and credentialing software for elderly care workers. Prolucent Health is a recruitment and retainment solution for flexible and permanent workers across healthcare. CareAcademy focuses on compliance and training for senior home care professionals.
Labor Marketplace
There are an abundance of labor marketplaces for nurses and non-clinical healthcare workers that are becoming more dynamic and attracting the next generation of talent. Clipboard Health offers a comprehensive database of jobs for nurses and Allied health staff. Incredible Health is a career marketplace that custom matches nurses to hospitals. Trusted streamlines the job application process for nurses and offers contracted jobs. CareRev uses AI to match nurses and healthcare professionals with available shifts. While certain marketplaces continue to gain market share and scale across particular areas of healthcare, opportunities abound for platforms that wed an apprenticeship model with a staffing marketplace and offer healthcare organizations a closed-loop network for talent.
Shift Management
While recruiting, upskilling, and staffing are critical elements to building a multi-layered labor optimization platform, managing and holding onto existing staff is essential. Workforce operations, while complex and the most significant contributor to an organization’s bottom line, especially due to labor mismanagement, offer perhaps the greatest opportunity for innovation and expansion as dynamic, internal shift management tools can draw in labor from one or more marketplaces. ConnectRn is a tech-enabled platform providing shift offerings for nurses, as well as scheduling, payment, and community resources. ShiftMed is a workforce management platform that supports the day-to-day operations for nurses and other healthcare professionals. Birdie provides an all-in-one solution for elderly care staff enablement and people operations. Reverence Care offers an AI-powered staffing platform for the management of home-based care services.
There are a plethora of other platforms that offer compelling use cases for dynamic staffing, and many of the companies highlighted above fall into multiple categories of this three-pronged hybrid model. As healthcare operations and technology expert Michael Skaff explains, “these platforms have recognized the differential value in attaching another complementary service, as it will help both drive efficiency in the customer operation and economic value in the platform.”
That said, there remains a massive white space for startups to emerge and transform staffing across the healthcare industry. An abundance of unemployed healthcare workers, as well as individuals still in high school or two-year educational programs, are eagerly seeking training and a career development path to thrive in the apprenticeship economy. Companies that build the piping and infrastructure for health systems and other medical organizations to recruit, retain, and manage a proprietary, closed network of talent will scale beyond point solutions to become true platform plays and attract significant venture capital.
A Staffing Model Beyond Healthcare
Ultimately, we believe that this proposed three-pronged hybrid staffing model can be applied to a multitude of sectors and leveraged as a framework to attract and retain skilled labor in the apprenticeship economy. We will get into those in subsequent posts.
At Fika, we are excited to invest in founders constructing enduring platforms for organizations to build loyalty with their underserved workforce.
Thanks to Michael Skaff and Jared S. Taylor for the comments and editing!
