Trusted Health, a Bay Area startup focused on changing the way nurses find jobs, has raised $20 million in Series A funding. Craft Ventures led the round, with general partner Jeff Fluhr, cofounder of Stubhub, joining the board. Existing investors Felicis Ventures and Founder Collective also contributed, as did strategic investors Healthbox and Texas Medical Center.

WHAT THEY DO

For the last 18 months, Trusted Health has been building out, and rolling out, a technology platform that helps nurses find jobs and negotiate pay, helps them manage credentialing and paperwork and employs contract nurses as full W2 employees to ensure they get full benefits.

“I was told coming out of school that there were always opportunities within nursing for me and I could take my career in any direction,” Sarah Gray, an RN who left pediatric nursing to become Trusted Health’s founding clinician, told MobiHealthNews. “And after a few years at the bedside I found myself looking around saying ‘Where are these opportunities? What are they?’ Everything is so different by specialty, by care setting, I felt a little bit like I didn’t have any transparency or control about my career and where I wanted to go next.”

Nurses can sign up for the platform and indicate their preferences and experience. Then they get matched with opportunities and the tool makes it as easy as possible to apply. There are no recruiters and Trusted Health doesn’t take a commission, which insures that negotiating is done in nurses’ best interest, Gray said.

“We’re able to compensate nurses in the way that they deserve and we’re able to save health systems money as well as filling these roles,” she said. “And when you look at it, you have positions that stay open and … it takes a toll. When you are short nurses and have vacancies, there’s burnout in your staff, you’re paying overtime for the current nurses that you have, and you’re potentially having to close beds and turn patients away because you don’t have nurses to take care of them. So when you can connect highly qualified professionals as quickly as possible to the open positions, it’s a win-win.”

The platform is designed to be automated, but Trusted also employes nurse advocates who can answer questions and facilitate onboarding and applications.

WHAT IT’S FOR

Trusted Health started in California but has already expanded into 20 states. It employs 20,000 nurses with another 1,000 joining each week.

“We were intrigued by Trusted Health’s strong growth figures, which underscore that today’s nurses want a reliable and easy-to-use employment solution," Craft Ventures’ Fluhr said in a statement. "Trusted Health has maintained capital efficiency, while demonstrating strong early momentum and consistent growth. At a time when there aren’t enough nurses to fill critical jobs, the Trusted Health team has built a successful technology-based platform that appeals to modern nurses, and ultimately helps hospitals deliver on their goal of improving patient care. With an experienced leadership team that understands both the employment and healthcare industries, we believe Trusted Health will fundamentally change the way the next generation of nurses approaches career development."

The funding will be used to keep pushing that expansion, with the goal of being in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The company also wants to expand the list of available opportunities by building out capabilities to support different kinds of jobs, and to generally improve the technology.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

Despite the looming threat of physician and nurse shortages, only a small number of startups are tackling these staffing challenges. Among the most well-known is Nomad Health, which has a similar platform but focuses on doctors primarily (although Nomad did expand into nursing in 2017). Still, with its laser focus on nurses and its nurse-heavy team, Trusted Health believes it has an edge with that group, the company told MobiHealthNews.

One aspect of medical staffing, credentialing, is the target of ProCredEx, a relatively new company using the blockchain to speed up the credentialing process.

ON THE RECORD

“Faced with increasing demand from patients and staffing challenges, there is no question the healthcare industry is at a critical juncture. Now is the right time for a platform like Trusted Health’s,” Fluhr said. “We look forward to helping Trusted Health become the dominant player in the healthcare employment landscape.”