Curtis Anderson

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.

Curtis bought the staffing agency and dove in to understand the business better. He interviewed multiple clinicians, including a nurse called Brandi working at an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a hospital. Brandi was integral to operations at the hospital, providing high quality care for patients in her department for over a decade. But whenBrandi needed time off to provide at-home care for her aging mother,the hospital could not offer the flexibility needed for Brandi to continue to work while caring for her mom.

Brandi switched to a different career that provided her with a more flexible schedule and the hospital struggled to fill her role for three months. Curtis realized that the traditional model of staffing agencies with fixed hours no longer met the needs of talented clinicians like Brandi, who require more flexibility for work-life balance. Nursa was born as a two-sided marketplace with the power to connect healthcare facilities needing shifts filled and experienced nurses who wanted to set their own schedules.

Delivering Better Care by Applying the Power of Technology to Staffing:
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“We devote time and energy to making that process better because we know at the end of the day, some one is going to get better care than they would have otherwise if we didn’t exist.”
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Facility managers are responsible for delivering consistent, high-quality care to patients. With so many of their challenges rooted in accessing the information needed to make the best decisions for the healthcare organization and the patients, digital technology opens up a world of possibilities for improving logistics. The Nursa digital marketplace solution matches facility managers with experienced clinicians so that together, they can meet the care needs of the patients. Nurses have the ability to do what they are trained for and work at the peak of their skill set thanks to the flexibility of picking their hours and location. By connecting nurses with opportunities that are best suited to their unique needs, Nursa enables them to be at the bedside of every patient in need. With a goal of building talent pools in all states across the nation, Nursa is just getting started.