SnapCare acquires staff scheduling automation platform Medecipher

Healthcare facilities and senior living providers are struggling to meet the demand for care with fewer resources: two-thirds of hospitals and healthcare systems ran at less than full capacity at some point in the past year because of staffing shortages. That, plus the cost of attracting and retaining nurses and other clinicians, is putting healthcare systems under enormous stress.

"Easing this dilemma for healthcare systems and clinicians requires adopting new workforce management technology that still keeps the human touch. Providers traditionally have relied on staffing agencies to supply nurses and clinicians for long- and short-term needs. It’s an expensive, opaque and clunky system that was stretched to its breaking point during the pandemic," said Jeff Grant, CEO of healthcare workforce solutions provider SnapCare.

SnapCare, previously known as SnapNurse, relaunched in late October with expanded its AI-enabled workforce marketplace solution to better meet customer needs. Now its furthering its goal of automating the healthcare workforce through the acquisition of Medecipher, a company that automates and improves the manual process of staff scheduling through a research-backed decision support tool.

No financial terms of the deal were disclosed, but the company will continue to operate as Medecipher, a SnapCare Company. 

The SnapCare platform eliminates the role and fees of the agency middleman by turning staffing control over to healthcare facilities and providing greater visibility into costs.

For an example of how SnapCare works, the company recently partnered with Incite Strategic Partners to leverage their workforce solutions platform in the senior living and senior care segments. The platform, Incite Workforce Solutions powered by SnapCare, allows Incite members to submit, track, and optimize all of their support needs in one location, with greater visibility into all available talent, including their own internal staff. Clinicians, meanwhile, can apply for posted roles, upload and manage their credentials, and build professional profiles to find the best opportunities for their current needs and skills.

"In addition to insights and recommendations to optimize the recruitment, onboarding and scheduling of nurses, allied health, direct care professionals, and other healthcare staff, the platform prioritizes and provides market-leading pricing for placement of permanent staff," said Grant.

"This helps members reduce their dependency on contingent and temporary labor and provide sustainable, consistent care for the growing population of seniors they serve."

SnapCare also work with a Department of Health in the southeast region to supply school nurses statewide, with which it developed an online portal, facilitating requests, verifying credentials, and ensuring ongoing care for over 100,000 students.

"It’s a smarter and lower-cost way for facilities to manage workforce needs, control costs, and deliver quality care. Nurses and other clinicians, for example physicians, radiologists, and medical assistants, will also find it easier to secure the work and schedules they want," Grant explained. 

"It won’t solve the staffing shortage on its own, but it will help healthcare systems fill their open positions and keep nurses and clinicians on the job."

Meanwhile, Medecipher's predictive staffing command center provides patient census and workload predictions and intelligently prescribes optimal shift plans to achieve appropriate staffing levels. By matching the skill sets of clinicians with patients’ needs, the company optimizes staffing levels in terms of both cost and treatment quality.

The Medecipher solution will integrate with other offers SnapCare provides to help facilities better optimize their internal staff.

By combining with SnapCare, Medecipher gets access to SnapCare's market penetration and brand awareness, as well as its resources, which offer the company "a potent opportunity to meaningfully accelerate its progression toward its full potential to revolutionize healthcare workforce management," said Grant.

"At the same time, Medecipher’s one-of-a-kind scheduling optimization technology solution will enable SnapCare to provide more robust and comprehensive staffing solutions for the healthcare market at their largest point of focus: solving internal staffing pain points first."

SnapCare is currently used by more than 380,000 clinicians and hundreds of healthcare organizations, and its able to provide its clients with a 15% savings over what many of its competitors charge due to increased transparency.

While a typical staffing company takes clinician pay rates and marks them up 40-75% to cover their costs for recruiting, credentialing, and employing a clinician while they serve a client. Included in that markup often is a hefty margin for profit, that’s not how SnapCare thinks about bill rates, Grant explained. 

"We take a transparent approach with our clients. We disclose the pay rate, the cost of benefits, and employment taxes, and then we set our bill rate from there with a view of passing along the savings our platform generates through its efficient matching algorithms," he said. 

Medecipher has also demonstrated improvements for its customers as well; for example, over a four-week scheduling period at a 28-bed hospital emergency department with 60,000 annual visits, Medecipher’s engine reduced labor costs by 8%. 

It also improved safety outcomes by 68%, with an improvement in average understaffing; decreased time required for schedule planning by 77%; and honored 100% of required RTO, PTO, and training requests, and 83% of optional nurse preferences, while adhering to all department and hospital labor policies and rules.

"Both SnapCare and Medecipher value transparency. The lack of pricing transparency is frustrating for healthcare and senior living providers and causes unnecessary tension between them and agencies. Our Transparent Pricing Promise gives clients greater control over their workforce solutions and lets them know that they aren’t being overcharged," said Grant.

"Medecipher’s solution is a perfect fit with SnapCare’s new, expanded platform. Combined, our suite of solutions uniquely aligns with facility priorities, optimizing for internal staffing and float pool first, with full visibility into our marketplace when needed to quickly fill any remaining open positions. With SnapCare workforce solutions, healthcare organizations will realize greater operating savings, reducing waste and inefficiency."