Built by Nurses, for Nurses: Rebuilding the Staffing Model from the Outside In

The staffing model broke in front of her, so she left to rebuild it.

Humla Founder and CEO Jessica Sylvester joined host Molly McCarthy, MBA, RN-BC (former U.S. Microsoft CNO) on The Smart Care Team Spotlight(opens in a new tab) to trace the path from directing emergency services at a Minneapolis trauma center to building a digital marketplace that connects health systems directly with credentialed W-2 nurses.

Jessica stepped into that ER leadership role one month before COVID hit. From the inside, she watched agencies and recruiters layer cost and delay onto every open shift while the nurses doing the work saw little of the money. Instead of accepting that as the price of staffing, she left the bedside and partnered with nursing and engineering leaders to build what she wished had existed: a platform where facilities and nurses find each other directly.

In this episode, they discuss:

• From the Trauma Center to the Marketplace: What Jessica saw as an emergency services director that convinced her the intermediary model could not be fixed from within.
• Four to Six Weeks, Down to Fifteen Minutes: How replacing agency placement with direct matching collapses the time it takes to get a qualified nurse on the schedule.
• Credentialing, Digitized: How Humla codified licensure, ACLS, BLS, PALS and assessment requirements so a nurse’s qualifications match to a shift automatically instead of sitting in a recruiter’s inbox.
• “Matches like a dating site, self-schedules like a Vrbo”: Why the consumer-grade experience nurses expect everywhere else is finally arriving in staffing.
• Why Health Systems Struggle to Innovate Internally: The organizational barriers that keep good ideas from nursing leaders from becoming operational reality.
• Financial Literacy for Nurses: What price transparency does for a workforce that has rarely been shown what its labor is actually worth.