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Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody! Saul Marquez with the HLTH Matters podcast, and welcome back to another episode. Want to remind you to subscribe to the podcast series if you haven’t had a chance to already and if you are returning for more, welcome back and thanks for tuning in. Today we have an interview with the outstanding Aamer Mumtaz. He’s a healthcare entrepreneur, advisor, investor, builder, and marketplace expert here to talk to us about the work being done by ShiftMed revolutionizing nursing jobs, helping solve for the staffing shortage, and really helping bridge the gaps around that win-win healthcare partnership to deliver the best in patient safety and patient care. So with that introduction, Aamer, I want to welcome you to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.
Aamer Mumtaz:
Thank you, Saul. Happy to be here.
Saul Marquez:
So before we get into the work that you and the team at ShiftMed do, I’d like to ask you, what is it that inspires your work in healthcare?
Aamer Mumtaz:
Really, at the end of the day, to me, it really is important to take care of the people, the population who require healthcare. Healthcare impacts all of us. I was actually working in a number of different industries before I made a switch to healthcare, and it was a very conscious decision because I wanted to work on something that was more meaningful to me personally. And it was after I personally had an encounter with the healthcare system in this country, I worked with some great people who took really good care of me when I needed the help, but at the same time saw how fragmented and how sort of difficult the whole system was of actually taking care of patients and how it made it really hard for the people who are taking care of me to take care of me. And it really made a real impact in me trying to figure out how I could be a part of the solution in that area.
Saul Marquez:
Thanks for sharing that, Aamer, you know, oftentimes it’s those personal experiences that happen to all of us to create that catalyst to do more. And so I’m happy to hear that you’re devoting your head and heart to healthcare solutions. Talk to us about ShiftMed. What is it that you guys are up to, to add value to the healthcare ecosystem?
Aamer Mumtaz:
ShiftMed is essentially a marketplace of healthcare clinical labor. We match the demand and the supply of healthcare labor, essentially, using a technology-based platform. In essence, we help our clients who are healthcare systems and other facilities, post-acute care and so on, to essentially have a labor ecosystem for themselves that’s more sustainable, less cost-effective, and that really helps them take care of their patients in a sustainable manner, which is very hard these days, as you know, because the healthcare labor force has really been struggling. So we try to use technology to help ease some of those areas of friction, essentially in getting those healthcare workers to go to work, essentially.
Saul Marquez:
It’s a big area of challenge, this labor challenge. There’s a lot of workforce issues. How are these things negatively affecting health systems?
Aamer Mumtaz:
So let’s start with labor challenges. As you know, staffing challenges in healthcare are not new. The pandemic, of course, made them much more visible to all of us, and they made it much bigger, but the problem itself has not actually been new. So the more recent sort of manifestations of that problem, I’ll give you a few facts, there has been increased turnover of healthcare workers. So we are this year at about 27% turnover for nursing in this country, which is just unbelievable. There is a major increase in early retirement, so the labor force, which is already pretty small, we are losing a lot of them at an increasingly higher rate. A lot of them are, especially when it comes to CNAs and people who are, haven’t gone through full, several years of nursing training, but who are actually working in healthcare, they have many other opportunities for work in other industries and they’re really burnt out and they’re really tired and they see all these other areas where they can go and work, and so we’re actually losing a lot of these people in a pretty rapid way. It’s very hard when you look at how healthcare systems work right now and try to recruit and retain nurses, for example, when it takes them three months to recruit one nurse, and this type of problem impacts everything. It’s like we can sort of say, oh, this is a labor problem, but in essence, it’s a financial problem. It’s a major systemwide problem for these healthcare systems, and as a result, as I’m sure you’ve seen, more than half of healthcare systems in this country are going to be in the red for this calendar year, and it’s not going to get any easier. The trends are continuing, this is not a short-term problem. Some of the essentially kind of short-term support we had as an industry from the government that is going away or has gone away. COVID has not completely gone away and we don’t know when it’s really going away. The flu season is upon us, has probably been like the worst flu season and at least a decade. So the healthcare industry needs help, it needs these people, and right now it doesn’t have the financial resources or really any type of resources and help to really address this problem.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, it’s a huge issue a lot of health systems are faced with. And the question is what is the best way forward and what are we doing to innovate in the space in a way that could help fill some of those gaps? And these clinicians that are delivering care for patients, we need them there. And so companies like ShiftMed are providing solutions to be able to bridge that gap. Effective models to help address workforce shortages and challenges are key. Can you talk to us about some of those and some of the work that you guys are doing with that?
Aamer Mumtaz:
Yeah, sure, so let me start off again with talking a little bit about the problem. I think we know and we sort of already talked about a little bit. We have fewer people, fewer available staff, there’s employee burnout over the last couple of years. Patients are actually getting more difficult, there’s more mental health issues. Patient equity is getting higher, is getting worse. So all this over the last couple of years especially has forced hospitals and hospital systems to rely more on contract staffing, in particular travel nursing to address these staffing shortages. It’s gotten so to the extent that you look at the most recent numbers, about a third of all staffing dollars and about a quarter of all staffing hours are actually provided by contract labor. So that’s a really increased reliance on contract labor, which primarily is travel nursing. There’s nothing wrong with this model per se, but travel nursing can be very expensive, as you know. … prices have been going up really high. It’s a very inflexible model. Most travel nursing contracts are 13 weeks, 12, 13 weeks long. It’s very hard to predict patient volumes at that scale. Healthcare systems need a much more flexible model, and what is really needed is something that’s more of a sustainable ecosystem of clinical labor, if you will. So I think the bottom line is that as far as travel nursing as a model is concerned, it has a role potentially, but it’s really not a sustainable long-term solution for any healthcare system. You can also not really hire yourself away from this problem. You can’t just recruit and hire more people, more nurses than other clinical professionals because A, that’s just financially very difficult, and B, there just aren’t that many people who are out there who are looking for full-time employment in one place for the rest of their careers. There are also other models that have come out there. There are legacy staffing companies that have seen some of the writing on the wall and are starting to move to more of an on-demand platform, working on, developing some sort of a tech platform to help serve the staffing needs of internal employees. They say they may have some marketplace technology that they can provide to their clients. But the problem with those models is that when you actually look at their fundamental business priorities, it is to have their core business model, which is travel nursing, have that sort of continue to be a part of their business, and plus, most of them have a lot of investor needs, which requires a certain sort of growth model that doesn’t quite work. So in essence, it’s kind of like cigarette companies who are selling you nicotine patches because they’re really not, at the end of the day, solving the fundamental problem that healthcare systems have, is not quite aligned with their perspectives as well. So honestly, the best model I have seen so far and the reason I joined ShiftMed is a W-2-based workforce marketplace model, an approach that doesn’t really try to maximize the use of external resources but tries to optimize the use of internal resources while having a flexible model that can flex up and flex down with an external model as well so I do have a sort of a longer-term sustainable ecosystem of clinical workforce. The whole idea should be it’s an optimization process, it has to be economically sustainable and it has to be designed in a way that matches the needs of the clinical workforce. Because one thing we haven’t really talked about is the reason we are having all these issues right now with clinical labor, it’s not the fault of the nurses. We just, as a society, just have not given them the right incentive structures, we have not given them the right financial structures, the incentives to think of nursing and to think of patient care as a career. A lot of these individuals, they are highly passionate about what they do, but we haven’t really been taking care of them as a society. I think it goes both broad from the society perspective and I think as an industry we just haven’t taken care of them the way we need to. And really, we are at a place now where a CNA, for example, working at a healthcare facility, making $20, $30 an hour can go to Amazon and back boxes in a warehouse and make more money. It sort of begs the question and not to get on my soapbox too much.
Saul Marquez:
But I mean, it’s a great point, right? It’s a labor market you’re competing with.
Aamer Mumtaz:
Yeah, exactly.
Saul Marquez:
And siloed from it.
Aamer Mumtaz:
You’re not siloed from it, and we are less siloed from it now than we used to be because all these individuals, they can just go to their phone and on their apps and find out what options they have out there. Linkedin, Indeed, everything is visible, everything is available. It’s very difficult now to sort of compete as an industry the way we used to in the past to recruit individuals. So that’s why going back, I apologize for the sidetrack.
Saul Marquez:
No, this is good. I mean, we’re digging into a very important issue. And fundamentally, it’s an incentive issue, it’s an appreciation recognition issue. And the challenge, Aamer, is, we are in an inflationary, I mean, extremely inflationary period. Nothing’s happening with reimbursement. So health systems are in a bind.
Aamer Mumtaz:
Now, health systems are in a bind. I think the health systems need to start off with recognizing very honestly, we as an industry historically have not recognized the real value we have from our clinical workers, our nurses. And it has to start with that, and then it has to, in this way, I like the ShiftMed model a lot, it has to recognize that this is not just a financial incentive structure. There is a hierarchy of needs and of incentives, and we need to sort of recognize that there are other issues, for example, child care, elder care, transportation, how do we go to work, how do we make sure these individuals can show up when the public transportation takes 2 hours? What sort of health benefits are we giving them? It’s all those sort of things that make their life a little easy for them so that they can show up to work. It is not just saying, okay, let’s add $5 per hour …
Saul Marquez:
Totally. Aamer, clarifying question, so you mentioned the platform you guys are building. So the employees, the caregivers are W-2 employees that work for ShiftMed and they are available on the platform, it’s more flexible and they’re geographically based?
Aamer Mumtaz:
They’re local.
Saul Marquez:
To the ecosystem.
Aamer Mumtaz:
That’s correct, so they do not travel. There’s no additional cost or hassle of getting them to move, and there’s also no long-term commitment, there’s no 13-week commitment. They can choose to work as much as they want, and if the individual facility wants them to be working for the next four weeks, that can also be arranged, but it’s a completely flexible model.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic. So it’s a marketplace, right? So nurses, I’m assuming you’re looking for nurses. You’re always looking for nurses.
Aamer Mumtaz:
Yes, we are. We always look for nurses. We also always look for CNAs, LPNs. Essentially, we look for the type of resources that clients are looking for, and those are the sort of key areas of need right now.
Saul Marquez:
And then on the provider side, how do people engage? How do they sign up with you?
Aamer Mumtaz:
It’s really quite easy. We set them up on our platform, our technology is very easy to set up. We go through the whole process of sort of identifying what their specific onboarding credentialing compliance requirements are, in many cases in post-acute facilities or ambulatory centers and so on. They’re fairly straightforward when it comes to acute care facilities, especially if they’re academic, educational hospitals, it’s a bit more complex, but we go through the process of sort of identifying all those and then we find the individuals for them, and credential and qualify them for their specific requirements. These are W-2 employees, our W-2 employees. So we take care of their payroll taxes, we take care of worker’s comp. These individuals also have the ability to get benefits through us. We have a partnership with Uber. So in many markets, we can get them to work, exactly, right, and it’s actually straightforward, they don’t have to go to the Uber app. They can call it the Uber transportation. No, it’s actually through our app.
Saul Marquez:
Through the app?
Aamer Mumtaz:
Our app, it’s all integrated.
Saul Marquez:
Plug it in.
Aamer Mumtaz:
Just plug it in, they don’t have to worry about anything. So we make it as easy as possible and then we are white label. So the facility, it would say facility X powered by ShiftMed. So essentially, as far as those individual workers, our labor, is concerned, they are working for that organization. It’s very important to us for our clients to think of this as their pool of local, essentially the local float pool. It’s their pool, they use them as and when they need them.
Saul Marquez:
So then to clarify this a little bit further, and thank you, the model is very interesting. So the IDN, the regional IDN will have a white-labeled platform and you guys hire for them and make that labor pool available. So in essence, you guys are taking the risk and sort of the overhead, in this partnership, the platform is white-labeled to them. So if it’s Intermountain, if it’s Kaiser or whatever.
Aamer Mumtaz:
Right.
Saul Marquez:
Then the W-2s that work for ShiftMed are seeing it as such. They’re seeing it as the Intermountain platform.
Aamer Mumtaz:
Yeah, they would see it as Intermountain.
Saul Marquez:
Powered by ShiftMed.
Aamer Mumtaz:
Right, exactly.
Saul Marquez:
And they work at that IDN not at other IDNs within the area or are there multiple? How does that work?
Aamer Mumtaz:
Yeah, that’s a very good question. So that varies by market. So if you’re going into a new market where we don’t have a significant presence and there is a strong demand by an Intermountain or some such entity, and they really know that there is a significant volume of need that they have, then we would actually sign an exclusive agreement with them and we would not work with other providers in the area. But in several markets where we are already existing, there are multiple providers who are using us.
Saul Marquez:
Okay, cool, sounds good. The model is interesting. It sounds flexible, it sounds like when you need it, it’s available. Like, how much lead time does a facility need to say, staff, oh, my gosh, we got all these flu cases, we need help?
Aamer Mumtaz:
It is completely up to the facility. Essentially, in most cases, they staff 4 to 6 weeks in advance, and then as they get closer to a date, they increase their need or they reduce their need over time. So they have the complete ability to do that. Our platform can take any date that they put on the platform as to when they need a shift. We also have an opportunity for the facility to request a guaranteed shift. So they would say, oh, we have these shifts four weeks from now, we are pretty sure we will need it, we guarantee that we will not cancel this, and that makes a huge incentive for our professionals to pick that shift.
Saul Marquez:
Because it’s a guaranteed shift.
Aamer Mumtaz:
Because it’s a guaranteed shift. They know they won’t get canceled, or if it does get canceled, they will get paid, and it avoids the facility having to do last-minute bonuses and additional.
Saul Marquez:
Totally, which could be very costly. Very costly.
Aamer Mumtaz:
Exactly.
Saul Marquez:
Aamer, this is stimulating and exciting, to know that an option like this exists. So thank you for introducing us to this model, to the ShiftMed way. As you think about the listeners tuning in today, what thought would you leave them with here to close?
Aamer Mumtaz:
One thing we lose sight of is that at the end of the day, all we want to do is make sure that we can provide services to patients. When we look at the financial situation of our healthcare systems right now, when we look at many facilities that are closing or they are cutting down service lines, especially when you look at safety net hospitals and inner city hospitals and rural hospitals, the situation is quite dire. I think we are getting to a stage where we’ve had a reduction, and we don’t have enough supply for the need, but we’re also essentially trying to reduce demand by reducing these services and that won’t work because our people, we need the help, the individuals need the help. So we have to continue being creative about finding different models that work, that can get people to go to work and that can satisfy this need as much as possible. I don’t know if ShiftMed is the perfect model, I don’t think it is. I think currently it is the best model that I have seen, but I think we have to continue to do better and try to figure out ways that we can take care of our healthcare workers so that they can take care of our patients.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. Aamer, well, I want to thank you so much for spending time with us here on the podcast today. If people want to learn more, where can they check you guys out online?
Aamer Mumtaz:
ShiftMed.com. They can go there if they are facilities or healthcare systems who are interested in reaching out to us, they can directly reach out and connect on the website. They can also go to my LinkedIn page, Aamer Mumtaz, and if there are nurses or other professionals who are interested in working with us again through our website, they can actually just sign up. It’s a very easy onboarding signup process. If they have the right qualifications, they have the right licenses, we are very eager to talk to them.
Saul Marquez:
Outstanding. Aamer, thank you, and folks, as a reminder, all of the resources and links that we’ve discussed on today’s podcast with Aamer, they’re available in the show notes, so just go there and you’ll see a link to ShiftMed, You’ll see a link to Aamer’s LinkedIn profile where you could get in touch with him either through there or the website. Bottom line, take some action on some of the things that you’ve heard today, because ultimately that’s where the results come from. Remember to subscribe to this podcast series. That’s how you get all of the interviews straight into your podcast feed with leaders like Aamer. Aamer, I really appreciate you being with us today.
Aamer Mumtaz:
Oh, thank you so much, Saul. I really enjoyed it.
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