As a product and engineering leader, Curtis Anderson built out multiple industry-specific SaaS offerings in the early part of his career, including a business intelligence solution for healthcare facilities providing dental and chiropractic care. Nurse staffing shortages, especially for per diem nurses, emerged as a pressing need in this work. Curtis became passionate about addressing these challenges by utilizing the power digital technology has to connect healthcare facility managers with qualified nurses looking for short-term assignments.
Eventually, Curtis looked at purchasing a traditional nurse staffing agency which had doubled in business annually for seven years. When he visited the headquarters of the staffing agency to learn more about its operations, he walked into a room with a large whiteboard. On one side of the whiteboard were green sticky notes with the names of the nurses, and on the other side orange notes with travel assignments for hospitals in need of nurses for a short period.
The method for matching the two was completely manual, with the staffing agency owner placing green sticky notes (nurses) next to orange ones (travel assignments).
The whole process looked like an adult game of telephone with five to seven parties calling facility managers with available, qualified nurses to fill shifts. Much like the kid's game on the playground, multiple layers between the facility manager at the hospital and the nurse resulted in confusion and inefficiency, resulting in high costs to staffing temporary clinician positions.