Healthcare Employment ‘Matchmaker’ ShiftKey Raises $300M, Valued At $2B 

ShiftKey, a Dallas-based scheduling platform for the health care industry, announced on Wednesday it raised $300 million at a well-over $2 billion valuation led by health care-focused private investment firm Lorient Capital.

ShiftKey is tackling a labor shortage that is crippling the medical system through a scheduling platform that connects licensed health care workers to medical facilities with staff openings. The company works with over 10,000 health care organizations across the U.S. and has onboarded hundreds of thousands of nurses, medical assistants and scribes.

“Nurses continue to choose to work on their own terms,” said Tom Ellis, founder and CEO of ShiftKey. “Our vision is to empower nurses and other licensed professionals through the combination of our core marketplace product along with additional technology and tools such as scheduling, payments, education and credentialing.”

Bigger economic factors

ShiftKey and scheduling platforms like it are combating a nursing shortage in America brought on by working long hours and juggling too many patients for too little pay. This exodus has affected every level of hospitals, from support staff to doctors, making it difficult for patients to access quality and on-time care.

Incredible Health, a San Francisco-based startup connecting nurses to health care facilities, raised $80 million in August. Los Angeles-based Greater Good Health, which aims to find long-term employment for nurse practitioners who can take on some of the work normally relegated to doctors, raised $10 million in May.

More and more nurses are moving toward short-term gig work or travel nurse work, which pays better than full-time employment at a hospital facility. But the rotating door of nurses can create inefficiencies in care — new workers have to catch up with patients’ medical histories and learn new workflows — and require hospitals to spend time constantly looking for new talent.

Companies like ShiftKey and Incredible Health are good short-term solutions for a decades-long staffing problem that has turned America’s health care system into a fragile one. But the evidence is clear: the only way to retain medical staff is to give them fewer patients to care for and pay them more.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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