Today we have selected Kevin Lundy to take his interview. He is the Founder & CEO of GapNurse.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
Thankfully, we’re all healthy and safe. Our team is dedicated to helping acute and post-acute healthcare facilities reduce turnover and simplify compliance. Our customers are the hardest hit with Covid. They’re the caregivers you see on TV or read about in the news. They are facing wave after wave of pressure. We are dedicated to a mission to help them. So far, we’ve been able to keep up to the challenge, but it’s often like drinking from a firehose.
There has been a lot of change in our industry with vaccine mandates, and it adds a lot of pressure to my team. Still, we’re just grateful to be in a position to help move nurses where and when they’re needed most and alleviate some of the pressure our colleagues in healthcare are facing.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
I’ve been in different areas of healthcare for about 25 years. Recently, I was the founder and CEO of a nonprofit hospice agency that cared for people who fell between the cracks of government and private insurance. This was an amazingly gratifying career, but I couldn’t help but realize the tremendous stress nurses on my team were facing. It got so bad that my nursing director suffered an emotional breakdown, causing all sorts of stress for my entire team.
I just felt compelled to do something, anything, to make a difference. There had to be a way to help these nurses. It seems the status quo believes that staff turnover is unavoidable, double shifts are expected, and patient care is about money. I can’t accept this, and I teamed up with a group of nurses and healthcare administrators who are done with that status quo mentality. We’re united in a mission to restore sensibility and common sense to care.
So, we built a tech platform that simplifies staffing and workflows. Facilities, employees, and contractors join in an open market, and schedules, skills, and culture match patient needs; training is instant, and fair pay and compliance are the new normal.
How does your company innovate?
We innovate by taking a complex world, breaking it down, and making sense of it. It takes a lot of experience, so we don’t innovate like many newbie tech stars. Instead, we take the real-world experience to solve real-world problems, and we include our customers at every step of the process. Our customers are driving the development requirements, and this inclusive process allows them to benefit instantly.
Now facilities see immediate cost savings, while clinicians see higher pay and improved job satisfaction. It’s truly incredible how we can cure simply by working together.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
Being in healthcare, Covid-19 has dramatically changed the public view of the landscape. Still, in many ways, Covid is just another virus, admittedly one that has spiraled out of control, but still just another virus. Practitioners in healthcare have been practicing infection control for eons. Despite the volumes of unfortunate families losing loved ones during this tragic event, licensed nurses are holding the line because that’s what they have always done.
These people are real heroes, and they work selflessly to care for people. Still, the facility administrators and support staff behind the scenes are often lost or blamed in many of these situations. These folks are the silent partner’s inpatient care, and they deserve more recognition than they’re getting. On our side, we are doing everything in our power to make sure that human resources, whether licensed nurses or others are protected against burnout and fatigue.
Double shifts are turning into triple shifts, which is unsafe, yet it’s become somewhat expected. When things looked like they were slowing down, another wave led to more stress, fatigue, and burnout. We are on a mission, and it’s that mission that unites my team in our battle against systemic pressures.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
We have NOT had to make difficult choices. We are devoting ourselves to solving a problem that seems to wax and wane from the public eye. Still, we’re battling an issue that’s been going on long before Covid ever hit, and we’ve built our tools to lessen the effects of licensed nurse shortages and burdensome regulatory compliance.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
We’ve built the GapNurse platform to create greater efficiencies in the care continuum. We’re very focused on HIPAA compliance and patient privacy while at the same time improving communications between facility managers, directors of nursing, and nurses on the front lines of care. Our mobile apps allow nurses to find shifts that are ideally suited to their needs, whether cultural, economic, or time considerations.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Our competitors are those traditional staffing agencies that have taken advantage of facilities facing nursing shortages and unplanned absences since the 1970s. We are NOT a staffing agency and never want to become one. We are a tech company that serves both care facility employees and independent nurses in the community.
Creating greater access to caregivers allows employees to restore balance to their lives while knowing their patients are safe and cared for by a well-qualified professional who might be looking to pick up a few extra hours to pay off some bills or go on a much-needed vacation. Our workflows are real-world, including care planning, documenting, and even add offer bi-directional quality measurements.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. We’re staying in the game by allowing our customers to serve as our product development team, working with group purchasing organizations. We’ve recently formalized partnerships with KiwiTech to assure technology excellence and Newchip Accelerator to navigate our way through the complex world of legal and finance.
Your final thoughts:
GapNurse is more than a company, and it’s tough to hear it described as a company, although I get why that’s necessary. GapNurse is a team of experienced professionals working together within its community to restore common sense to the caregiving environment.
Our team has over 120 years of direct patient care experience; we’re not just tech guys trying to cash in on a good idea; we’re people who’ve been impacted by the systemic pressures that have mounted over the past 25 years. We’ve also been around long enough to know that our turn is coming soon enough, and we we don’t step up and do something about the care continuum today, we’ll be kicking ourselves because we had the chance to do something but didn’t.
- Spokesperson: Kevin Lundy
- Company: GapNurse
- Website link: https://gapnurse.com/