A staffing software provider aimed at long-term care operators on Thursday announced an injection of $10.8 million in additional funding as it attempts to expand beyond its current four-state footprint.
The Quincy, Mass.-based IntelyCare raised the funds in a Series A round led by Leerink Revelation Partners, along with Longmeadow Capital, LRV Health, and former skilled nursing owner and operator Bill Mantzoukas.
Since its founding in 2015, the company has pulled in a total of $14 million, and currently matches nurses and certified nursing assistants with hundreds of long-term care facilities, according to CEO David Coppins.
“We feel like we’re solving that big problem for both the nurses and our health care facilities, and we’re growing quickly with that,” Coppins said.
Coppins declined to give specific figures, but said that so far, “tens of thousands” of nurses and certified nursing assistants (CNAs) have been matched to providers using IntelyCare’s app. Operators are charged a flat hourly rate for the company’s services, but IntelyCare uses a dynamic pricing system to determine exactly how much the nurse will be paid for a specific shift — based on a variety of factors including time of day, the employee’s experience and skillset, and the rating of a particular facility.
“The client needs to be able to budget and count on a certain degree of revenue,” Coppins said. “But what we pay the nurses and CNAs out there — each particular opportunity for them to go to work — is priced dynamically by our machine-learning algorithms.”
So far, the algorithms have collected 600,000 individual observations about employee and employer behavior so far, and IntelyCare has already begun to use some of that information to predict facilities’ future care needs; about 70% of the time, the software correctly identifies an upcoming increase or decrease in a particular building’s staffing needs, according to Coppins. For the nurses who use the platform, the software also filters the available opportunities based on their prior behavior, sending jobs that most closely match the ones they’ve previously accepted or viewed to the top of the list.
IntelyCare is part of a growing industry of “smart” staffing solutions for nursing care providers, which struggle with persistent labor shortages amid low unemployment and increased competition from companies outside of the health care industry — such as retail and logistics — that can offer higher hourly wages.
Coppins sees parallels between the current predicament in long-term health care and the other industries he’s worked in. Before joining IntelyCare, he was the president of Virgin Pulse, an employee engagement platform, and was the co-founder and president of UPromise, a kind of loyalty program designed to help consumers start and fund college savings plans.
“What I really developed are these marketplaces where we’ve got two clear sets of customers, with big supply and demand on both sides,” Coppins said. “That’s what we feel like we’re building here, which is different than the agency world.”
IntelyCare will use this most recent capital infusion to expand its platform into more states and add more participating nurses.
“You can assume that in the next year and a half, we’ll be in all the major markets across the country,” Coppins said.
Written by Alex Spanko