IntelyCare CEO David Coppins on VatorNews podcast

IntelyCare uses AI to match nurses with facilities to solve the looming nursing shortage

Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco interview David Coppins, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of IntelyCare, an intelligent workforce management solution for post-acute healthcare facilities. The company recently raised a $45 million Series B round of funding, bringing its total to $55.5 million.

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For these digital health podcasts, our goal is to also understand these three high-level questions: How are we empowering the consumer? Are we creating productivity that also allows us to see overall economic costs go down? How is this advancement changing the role of the doctor?

Highlights from the interview:

• There are 6 million nurses, and nurse assistants; while the opportunities to work in permanent positions have been pretty good, but if they want to work and take on additional shifts, it's been a terrible experience. 
• IntelyCare solves that problem by allowing skilled nursing facility partners to post that they have shifts available to its 20,000 nurses who can go into the app every day to check to see what's available for them to work. They get to choose how much, how often, when, and where they want to work. They also get to choose the pay rate.
• According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2022, the nation needs 1.1 million new RNs to avoid a nursing shortage. Coppins believes that the number is even worse than that, because hundreds of thousands of nurses and assistants left the workforce during COVID, with no intention to return.
• IntelyCare is expanding the capacity of nurses by a minimum of 15%, thereby expanding the workforce, not by adding new bodies, but through smarter matching and allocation of resources. 
• The nurses are employees of IntelyCare. The company gives them all of the flexibility of being a gig worker, where they can work if they want to or not, while also paying their payrolls taxes and worker's comp, and liability insurance. They also have benefits and a 401k. Nurses also get paid better working on a per diem basis, making 20% more with IntelyCare. 
• A fundamental part of IntelyCare's solution is using artificial intelligence to best match nurses and jobs. A typical agency is filling 20% of their demand, so they can only fill four out of every 20 shifts; with IntelyCare, they can fill 15 of those 20. This done through dynamic pricing based on how easy or difficult it is to fill each shift. The algorithms can also detect when certain shifts are harder to fill and add a flash bonus on those shifts to help fill them. IntelyCare's AI can even do predictive shift creation.
• IntelyCare's customers are the facilities, so the company isn't billing insurance or payers. The facilities are billing out for their patients, and the company is providing staff for them to have in their facility. The company charges on a per-usage basis, using the existing agency model of charging per hour to have an RN in the facility. 
• IntelyCare does not require its nurses to get a COVID vaccination, but that will likely be driven by what the facilities need. While facilities are worried about requiring it, and their workforce going to work at places that don't, Coppins thinks it is the right thing for a lot of them to do. 
• IntelyCare costs less for the facilities than what they typically pay agencies, who charge extra fees. Just by adding up all the fees, the company is lowering the cost of care. By using IntelyCare, facilities only have to pay for the shifts they need filled, and don't have to make long-term commitments and contracts. 
• There's a lot of momentum to get people out of skilled nursing, or out of the hospital and into the home much faster. That's why IntelyCare's intent is to use the workforce that it has built up, most of whom have already been working in home health, and expand into the home health space. The company has pilot programs coming out with some of the largest home health companies. 

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