Wei Deng, founder and CEO of Clipboard Health, on VatorNews podcast

Clipboard Health is a healthcare staffing marketplace that was recently valued at $1.3 billion

Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Wei Deng, founder and CEO of Clipboard Health, a marketplace offering no-commitment staffing for healthcare facilities and on-demand shifts for healthcare professionals.

Clipboard is a two-sides marketplace, catering to both healthcare professionals and facilities. It works by having a scheduling coordinator at a healthcare facility post shifts that they need to fill on a calendar that the professionals can see. The nurses look at the time, location and pay being offered, and then they choose the shifts that are convenient for them.

The company recently raised an $80 million round of funding, bringing its total to $90 million, with a $1.3 billion valuation.

Our overall goal is to understand how technology is radically changing healthcare: the way we screen, treat and measure progress and outcomes. How we’re empowering the consumer. Whether we’re creating productivity that drives economic costs down? And how tech advancements change the role of the doctor. 

Highlights from the interview:

• The initial mission of the company was to help lift as many people up the socioeconomic ladder as possible, so it started as a financial product to help refinance student loans. While looking for users who would be interested in the financial product, such as nurses, doctors, and lawyers, all the nurses wanted help finding a better job or a job with a better schedule. That's how the company shifted to working in the healthcare vertical.
• Before COVID, there was always some level of burnout because the job is physically demanding job and you don't have that many options in terms of flexibility. COVID exacerbated burnout because for the physicians and nurses who had to be in the ICU units and working with COVID patients, it was very stressful, there was so much demand for their time, and they also felt like they couldn't just leave the patients. So, they were getting overworked. It also highlighted the need for some way of solving this burnout problem, and scheduling is one of the components.
• There has been a nursing shortage, and one reason is the lack of educators. Also, new grad nurses have very little training and experience, and almost no hospitals want to take a chance on them. Hospitals now have residency equivalent programs for nurses, and unless they enter one of these programs, it's very hard to get a job. So, the nurses with experience are getting all the demand but then the new grads who actually require trading are not getting hired, while students who want to enter nursing school are not even getting accepted or have to wait because there are not enough teachers.
• The problem the company solves for healthcare facilities is quality of patient care. A long-term care facility that has 200 beds, and has two nurses on staff, even if those are two of the best nurses, they physically cannot serve that many people. So, step number one is helping to stop the bleeding by giving them actual bodies to help serve the patients. Step two is quality control and making sure that the people who are in the building are reliable, have good bedside manner, and have experience with patient care in that particular setting.
• Deng compares the platform to companies like DoorDash, Upwork, Uber, and other talent marketplaces where the person who is requesting has their requirements, while the supply side, in this case the healthcare workers, pick and choose, assuming they have already been onboarded and have all of their documents in place.
• There is going to be a move towards in-home and virtual care, which also means that there's going to be even more of a demand for companies like Clipboard, where you can get staff on-demand. This is an area that Clipboard does eventually want to expand to, probably partnering with home health agencies at first, but also possibly also being licensed and being able to provide direct care via our its staffing infrastructure.

Thank you to our sponsors: Advsr; a boutique M&A advisory firm. They wrote the book on startup M&A called "Magic Box Paradigm: A framework for startup acquisitions." Go to Amazon.com to get your copy. Also thanks to Stratpoint, an outsourced engineering firm and Scrubbed, an online bookkeeping firm. If you need affordable and quality engineering and bookkeeping, check them out. We highly recommend them!

Subscribe to our podcasts to get our interviews and shows as soon as they're published!