The Role of Technology in Healthcare Staffing: An Interview with Sarah Gray, Founding Clinician at Trusted Health
Sarah Gray is the Founding Clinician at Trusted Health, the career platform for the modern nurse. Sarah is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Nursing School and began her nursing career at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. Prior to moving away from the bedside, she was a Clinical Nurse III and an Evidence Based Practice Fellow, and served on multiple hospital-wide committee boards. At Trusted, she utilizes her clinical insight and passion for innovation to change how nurses manage their careers and solve for inefficiencies within healthcare staffing.
If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that pandemics are wildly unpredictable, we should be washing our hands more often, and many of our most important social systems are incredibly fragile. Enter, healthcare. Prior to Kellogg, I worked at Trusted Health, a healthcare staffing start-up on a mission to close the healthcare staffing gap. As a Product Marketer on their nurse-facing platform, I worked partnered with our Product, Care, and Marketing teams to help nurses more easily find open travel nursing contract positions they loved. Recently, I spoke with Sarah Gray, Trusted’s founding clinician and Product Marketing Manager, to better understand how Trusted sees the future of the clinician staffing crisis.
EL: Trusted’s mission is to help people everywhere get the care they need -- how is Trusted uniquely tackling that problem?
SG: Trusted is mobilizing healthcare professionals through technology. We’re building a double-sided marketplace that helps solve the problem of the healthcare staffing shortage from two angles: from the clinician side and from the healthcare system, or employer, side. On the clinician side, we’re leveraging technology to allow nurses to match to the open opportunities that best match their skills and goals and quickly apply with a Trusted profile. This process used to take a lot of back and forth over email with a recruiter, and we’re putting the right tools in the hands of the nurse to take control of their careers. We’re using the efficiency gained through technology here to put more money in the paychecks of nurses and provide them with more robust benefits; additionally, we’re supporting nurses staying in the profession through mental health and community resources.
I’m also really excited about the B2B tool we launched at the end of last year -- Works. This platform allows healthcare systems to more efficiently find qualified clinicians for the open roles they have. With Works, healthcare systems can manage all the data and processes around their internal and external staff on one system. In a lot of ways, what we’re building on this side of our platform is like using Uber Eats to order dinner: you put in your order and we figure out the most efficient way to get it to you.
EL: This year, our conference’s theme is about the interconnectivity between people, processes, and technology in healthcare. How does this interconnectivity impact the work you do?
SG: What Trusted does is about more than just connecting nurses to the jobs -- we’re also equipping nurses with the tools to be successful while in that new role, so that they can focus on providing the best patient care. In finding a new contract nursing role, onboarding, and becoming an employee, there are a number of arduous processes. We’ve designed an app that streamlines this process, making it simple and accessible for nurses to quickly go through the steps they need to, so they can focus on what they do best — providing their patients the best care.
We also connect each nurse with a Care Team that supports them through the job search, onboarding, and while they’re on assignment. We talk a lot about people-powered technology at Trusted. We’re leveraging both people and technology to tackle the challenge; healthcare is such a people-centric industry, I think the solutions need to take that into design.
EL: Nurses have long been the backbone of our healthcare system and it’s no secret that the pandemic has revealed that, and our current nursing shortage, in spades. What impact has the last two years made on the nursing profession? Do you think there will be any lasting ramifications?
SG: Like in many industries, the pandemic revealed a lot of what’s already been broken in healthcare. We were previously already experiencing nurse burnout and a healthcare staffing crisis, but COVID-19 has exasperated that.
According to a study of 1400+ nurses that we released early last year, nearly two-thirds of nurses are experiencing depression, stress and PTSD; moral injuries, and bouts of compassion fatigue. And even more concerning — in the midst of a nationwide nursing shortage that predated the pandemic — nearly half of the respondents in our survey reported feeling less committed to the profession than they were before the pandemic. This finding was particularly pronounced amongst nurses under 40, who were 22 percent more likely than average to report that their commitment to nursing had decreased.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the nurses in our 2021 Nurse Career and Satisfaction Survey tried travel nursing during the pandemic — 48% of those who had ever taken a travel contract did so for the first time during COVID. What is surprising is that many of them aren’t interested in going back to a single hospital — fully 20% of those on travel or per diem contracts said nothing would make them interested in a permanent role.
A more positive impact we’re seeing, however, is increased mobility in the nursing profession. Like many registered or licensed professionals, nurses are licensed to work state by state. We’re seeing easing in requirements here as states launch executive orders to allow nurses to come from other states to work where the need is the highest.
EL: Prior to joining the Trusted team, you worked as a nurse. How has working in healthcare technology impacted the opportunities for improvement you see in nursing or patient care broadly?
SG: Two things come to mind. First, healthcare can be so self-contained at times, when in reality, a lot of the problems we see in healthcare aren’t unique to healthcare. Having worked outside of patient care now for a bit, I see that a lot of the operational problems are felt in other industries and have been solved elsewhere. I think there’s an opportunity for healthcare to look outside the industry for innovative, analogous solutions.
The second is that we have to invest more in our people. Working in technology and living in San Francisco has opened my eyes to the great benefits and work environments that a lot of my friends (and now me) in tech get to enjoy. In healthcare, we’re so obsessed with metrics -- how many infections? How many discharges before noon? But in reality, nurses are the largest variable in our solution. It only makes sense that we should be investing in them to see better outcomes on the other side.
EL: When you think about Trusted’s roadmap for the year and beyond, what opportunities excite you most?
We’ve been working on building the best experience for nurses looking to find new opportunities for the last four years now, and we’ve learned a ton in that process. I’m so excited that we’ve finally launched Works and can continue to scale those insights and our impact on the clinician staffing crisis. It’s so exciting for me to see these two sides of the platform come together. As we look into this year and beyond, we’re thinking about how we can scale these solutions beyond just nursing contract opportunities -- the potential for impact on other clinician types is huge and I’m excited to see the problems we solve there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ela Lasic is a first-year MBA student at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. Prior to Kellogg, she was the Product Marketing Lead at Trusted Health. While there, she partnered closely with the Product, Community, and Growth Marketing teams to develop product and marketing experiences that helped nurses reach the next step in their careers. Ela is passionate about innovative solutions in the consumer space, especially within femtech, healthcare, and wellness.