Incredible Health updates its healthcare career platform to help nurse hiring cope with COVID

The healthcare industry, even prior to the current pandemic, has never looked much like other industries when it comes to hiring and career management. That was the impetus behind Incredible Health, a startup founded by medical doctor Iman Abuzeid and Amazon alum Rome Portlock. The platform Incredible Health built is all about connecting nurses with jobs - but it goes above and beyond your typical online job board in order to provide better service both to job seekers and hospitals, and to help nurses throughout the course of their careers.

I spoke to Abuzeid, who serves as Incredible Health's CEO, about some new features that Incredible Health has just introduced, in part to address the particular needs of nurses and hospitals considering the constraints of COVID-19 and the ongoing challenges it presents. She first explained why Incredible is a unique platform to begin with, among a sea of relatively undifferentiated job search products.

There are three unique things about the platform," she said. The first is that the employers apply to the nurses instead of the other way around - which we can do because of this huge supply-demand imbalance. The second is that we've automated the screening and pre-vetting of the nurses, so we're able to automatically verify things like licenses and certifications, and experiences and so on, because we've integrated with so many databases. And the third thing we do is custom matching algorithms."

That means Incredible Health provides hospitals with only matches that meet their exact needs for a specific position requirement, rather than forcing them to wade through large numbers of potential applicants who might not have the skills they need. In a field like nursing, which has a lot of specific professional designations and certifications, specificity actually helps both sides quite a bit.

The end result of all of that is hires that happen at least three or four times faster," Abuzeid told me. Our average right now is 13 days, and the efficiency is about 30 times more efficient than a standard job board. Really, some of the biggest impacts we have are financial - we save on average, each hospital we work with, about $2 million per year. We do that by reducing their travel nurse budget, because they don't have to use as many contract workers when they're permanently staffed. And we also reduce their overtime costs, and their HR costs."

Abuzeid also told me that nurses hired through Incredible Health tend to stick around longer. The startup only has about a year of historical data to check against so far, but she said that so far, they're seeing about 25% percent higher retention vs. the industry average. She added that they suspect this is due largely to the fact that nurses are able to consider multiple offers and hospital options on the platform, since there are often multiple employers vying to hire the same employee, especially in the case of specialization like ICU nurses.

As for what's new to Incredible Health, the company has introduced automated interview scheduling. Abuzeid says that has led to 70% of interviews being scheduled via automation within 36 hours on the platform currently. The platform has also introduced remote interviewing for safely distanced pre-hiring interactions, and in-app chat between potential employers and nurses right in the iOS, Android and web apps that Incredible Health offers. Profiles for nurses on the platform also now list socialites and skills, from a pre-set catalog of 45 specialities and 250 skills that are specific to the nursing field, like ICU or OR expertise. Abuzeid said that most of these were fast-tracked due to significant changes they were seeing in the hiring process as a result of the COVID pandemic.

We saw several impacts," she told me. First is like the number of offers that started to go out - we see one go out every few hours now. And the number of interview requests is up to one being sent every few minutes. So it's really accelerated, and that's been a combination of two things. One is just that we made the software better and more efficient - but the other thing is the urgency also increased on the hospital end given the pandemic."

Aside from improving the process of hiring vs. traditional methods, and supporting more remote hiring and onboarding workflows, Incredible Health also addresses some of the diversity gaps in the current healthcare industry hiring process. Abuzeid explained that that's due in part to built-in features of the platform like salary estimate calculators, and adds that some tweaks have been created intentionally to level the playing field.

30% of nurses identity in the U.S. identify as minorities, so we take diversity pretty seriously because that's a huge chunk of our user base," she said. By giving nurses salary data, it democratizes that and makes you more informed. We also provide talent advocates who are also nurses on our team that support every single nurse, helping them almost as career coach to support them throughout the hiring process."

Incredible Health also takes steps to ensure the product isn't itself reinforcing any existing biases that may be present, consciously or otherwise, on the part of hiring parties.

We random sort the list of the list of nurses as they're displayed in front of employers and the application, or we use avatars instead of profile pictures," We're also constantly monitoring the data that that that's in the platform. So for example, we noticed that recruiters were biasing against nurses that lived further away. And so we just removed the current location of the nurse, we just stopped displaying that, and that bias went away. So it's really important that the software and our algorithms actually counter human bias."

So far, Incredible Health has raised $17 million in funding, including a Series A last year led by Jeff Jordan at Andreessen Horowitz. The company is already in use at over 200 hospitals across the U.S., as well as at a number of the largest health care networks in the country, like HCA and Baylor, and at academics medical centres including Cedar Sinai and Stanford as well. The startup is growing quickly by addressing a long-standing need with software designed specifically to the challenge, and looks poised for even more future growth as the demand for qualified, well-supported healthcare professionals grows.