When Amedisys Inc. (Nasdaq: AMED) participated in the connectRN’s $76 million funding round at the end of 2021, it was because it believed in what the company was doing.
But, more broadly, it was a reaction to the contemporary staffing situation in home health care.
The connectRN platform was originally built to find nurses and other health care professionals work, particularly in skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). But since then, the company has aggressively expanded into home health care.
That expansion took place at a good time. After all, the home health workforce doesn’t look the same as it did in 2019. Providers are having to fulfill cases with more PRNs and gig-type workers than ever before.
The workers want flexibility, and that has forced providers to also be flexible.
“Amedisys is expert at managing full-time employees,” Cora Jaulin, the VP of home health at connectRN, said at Home Health Care News’ Capital + Strategy event Thursday. “The thing that we do well is support a per diem workforce. We leverage our expertise together.”
Clinicians can use the connectRN platform to choose cases to work on, whether it’s on top of their full-time jobs or just for part-time work.
“We know that our clinicians, in general, who have full time jobs are maybe looking for the evenings or the weekends,” Jaulin said. “So, leveraging our app and platform, we can help extend that workforce and keep an engaged workforce. It’s just another example of leveraging the strength of the two organizations to set both for up for success.”
Amedisys has learned from connectRN’s approach to staffing, Geoffrey Abraskin – a senior vice president at Amedisys – said. Likewise, connectRN has been able to glean insights about the home health industry from one of its biggest providers.
“We have two different pilots that we have started,” Abraskin said at the event. “The first one was using the connectRN staff – that gig labor pool – to supplement our current staffing levels. Through that, we’ve actually seen some really great results thus far. The cost of our labor is actually about 15 to 25% lower than what we’re currently paying for other contingent labor.”
The other area the two are working together is on Amedisys staff using the connectRN platform themselves to find more work.
That allows staff to pick up a shift when a scheduler may not be available to help them get another shift, which, in turn, reduces Amedisys’ capacity.
“What happens on a Friday is, if our scheduler calls the nurse, and they don’t get that message until five o’clock, they then call back to the office saying I could do a couple hours on Saturday,” Abraskin said. “But the office is closed, so we lose capacity. This allows that workforce that is not the always the easiest to get a hold of – because they have other commitments – the ability to pick up work through the connectRN platform and support us that way.”
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