As doctors, we experienced first-hand the difficulties of finding coverage for time off or additional help at our private practice. We would spend hours calling friends from our Rolodex or posting on Facebook, with limited success. The other option was to use a staffing agency, that charged between 40-100% fee for finding coverage.
We realized that this problem can be solved by bringing both sides of the market together on one platform and eliminating the middleman, so we created ShiftDoc. We use the Airbnb type model to help offices search for available healthcare professionals during their time of need. Eventually, we plan to add automated credentialing and video calling for interviews so the process is seamless.
With the Affordable Care Act, aging population, and baby boomers, the number of patients has increased greatly, but there is a shortage of healthcare professionals. This has led to a rise in temporary staffing and is expected to grow 6% annually, making it a $15B industry. Hospitals and some practices can spend up to $4000 on top of the daily salary for a temporary hire. We want to significantly reduce those fees by making the entire process automatic, so facilities can hire more professionals to care for more patients.
We look forward to getting your feedback. We would love to discuss your thoughts on leveraging technology to improve healthcare. Thank you!
That said, this is an inevitable development in healthcare and I welcome your approach using software to automate the process.
Source I'm a doctor. I have done temp work through agencies such as this one. And I'm a software developer.
Getting people set up with domain credentials and doing standard prep work were some of the other complaints I heard about, so good move there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15034118