Editor’s Note: From time to time we will be taking a closer look at digital health innovation, specifically with regards to startups in SoCal. Today’s profile reflects on Wanderly, a startup based in Long Beach that is working to improve travel nurse recruitment in the medical staffing industry. You can find Wanderly at their website, on Twitter at @wanderlynurses, and on Instagram at @wanderlynurses.
Nursing is currently and will continue to be one of the professions that sustains high demand over the coming years. The job outlook as indicated by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a 19% growth by the year 2022. Today’s headlines also describe a related dilemma: nursing shortages are becoming even more acute because schools are unequipped to handle the demand for education and training, struggling to expand class size and hire more nursing teachers.
Of the nurses that are trained, available and not yet ready to retire, they are flush with opportunities. Travel nursing is one such opportunity — born from the sustained employee shortage in the industry — it is rapidly growing in popularity. Some experts even suggest that demand for travel nurses is at a 20 year high.
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Travel nurses contract with staffing agencies for 13-week periods, and upon contract agreement are sent to geographic areas to help fill employee gaps at hospitals. As a consequence of the talent shortage, medical facilities may begin to rely more and more on travel nurses and other contracted workers to supplement their employee bases. It is really a matter of finances: it is more cost effective to bring in temporary workers than it is to hire full-time staff to manage the ebb and flow of talent needs.
Historically, however, travel nurse recruitment has suffered from time consuming, clunky processes, lack of transparency, and poor repetitive workflow issues. Travel nurses had to not only research agencies themselves but they had to individually apply to each agency, submit the same skills test repeatedly, and unwillingly engage with aggressive recruiters, among many challenges. That’s a lot of paperwork, particularly when it is estimated that there are approximately 340 travel nurse agencies in the US each with their own assignment listings. The research alone would be daunting!
Enter Wanderly.
Demand is at a 20 year high for travel nurses + a historically clunky, time consuming and cumbersome process + professionals amenable to new solutions = ripe opportunity for innovation.
Based in Long Beach, Wanderly is a platform that aggregates pay packages and assignments from staffing agency partners across the US. Nurses can upload their application documents once, and interact anonymously with agency recruiters while comparing pay packages and assignments in different geographic areas. Instead of going to 340 separate agency websites, travel nurses can go to one — Wanderly — and research agency listings.
Streamlined solution, increased transparency, collaboration amongst ecosystem stakeholders — all themes consistent with digital health innovation.
We spoke with Tom Lingle, who currently serves as the startup’s President and prior to this had built his entire career in medical staffing. Below, he answers a few questions about how Wanderly has developed a more streamlined solution to travel nurse recruitment.
Digital Health Los Angeles (DHLA): I understand that Wanderly’s leadership has extensive experience in healthcare staffing and as a result has accumulated deep insights into gaps in service and areas of opportunities for innovations. What would you say are the three top pain points that Wanderly is trying to address and ultimately improve upon in the healthcare staffing industry?
Tom Lingle (TL): We want to empower travel nurses with accurate data to enable them to better evaluate their next travel assignment. We want to increase accountability and transparency across the industry, which we hope will ultimately increase trust as well. Lastly, we want to increase standardization that will make for a more efficient industry. I think one of our biggest challenges as an organization is choosing what gap to address and when, since as we all know — timing is everything
DHLA: Given that travel nurses are your primary target audience, describe the efforts your company takes to continually understand their needs. For example, what structures have you built within your design & tech processes that ensure your customer profile needs are being addressed as you evolve and scale?
TL: We came to market with a framework of problems that we wanted to solve, and by listening to what travel nurses really need, we have enhanced our offering exponentially. We did a considerable amount of listening in order to understand pain points amongst the travel nurse profession, and we built solutions to help solve these pain points, that will ultimately evolve the industry. Without being specific about some of the tech we are developing, we believe there are many areas in the industry where blockchain and HR-JSON could be implemented. I’d like to say we will be a leader in this industry as far as technology.
DHLA: One of the benefits of having a growing digital health community is the ability to leverage our connections to extend support and share opportunities. Thinking forward and down the road as Wanderly continues to scale, what areas of the company do you anticipate needing future talent?
TL: Everywhere. In all seriousness, talent areas that have higher priority are software development, business analysis and project management. We have an incredible team and would love to have more like-minded people join us on this journey. Once we have fully met the needs of the travel nurse, we intend to leverage our lessons learned and grow other verticals within the medical staffing industry.
DHLA: Wanderly is a relatively new startup in the SoCal area. What was the most difficult challenge the company encountered in launching, and how did the company overcome it?
TL: I think the biggest challenge we have faced is building our team and culture. Finding talent is always a challenge, especially when competition is fierce and the labor market is tight like it is in Los Angeles. Maintaining the team’s focus and keeping the team motivated and agile have been continuous challenges day in and day out. We overcome these minor obstacles by celebrating small successes together and then quickly moving on to the next challenge.
DHLA: Given that Wanderly was founded in 2017, where does the company hope to be by this time next year? Give us some insight into your growth goals going forward.
TL: I can’t believe it has been a year already, time flies when you are having fun! We have some aggressive growth goals in the next year across all areas of Wanderly’s operations. Speaking from a 50,000 foot level, I hope we continue to innovate and create value for the healthcare staffing industry. We are laser focused on creating value for everyone who comes in contact with our company. If we can continue to do this, we will be in a great place.
DHLA: And finally, curious health tech marketers want to know, what was the inspiration for Wanda the Pineapple? Why did you decide to use this approach, and what kind of results have you been receiving since it’s implementation?
TL: In the beginning, our creative team spent a lot of time developing our brand identity, colors, etc., and we discovered during this process that the pineapple stands for open-ness, hospitality and friendship. The pineapple represents who Wanderly is, and what we are all about. It was on a Sunday morning when we were meeting to discuss the brand and we presented the pineapple, that things just clicked. In the same meeting, one of our founding shareholders actually jumped the gun and suggested out loud that we should give the pineapple a name and make it our mascot. Prior to this, the creative team had not said a word, but he had guessed what we were about to propose: Wanda the Pineapple, our mascot. To answer your question regarding results, we launched at The Travelers Conference in September 2017 and Wanda the Pineapple was very well received by both the agencies we partner with and the travel nurses we serve.
Thank you for reading and please feel free to add your thoughts below in the comments.