Nomad Health Raises $63 Million to Connect Nurses and Hospitals

(Bloomberg) -- Nomad Health, a digital marketplace that connects nurses to short-term medical jobs, raised $63 million in new equity and debt financing led by Adams Street Partners.

The latest investment values the company at $260 million, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. With the latest financing, Nomad Health has raised over $100 million since its inception in 2015.

Nomad Health streamlines the process of connecting health-care workers to short-term jobs around the U.S. Nurses can create a profile on the marketplace and fill out their preferences and qualifications. Hospitals use the platform to post jobs. The database is searchable, allowing so-called travel nurses to choose gig jobs based on factors like location and pay.

“It’s a self-service discovery experience,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Alexi Gharib Nazem.

The urgency of the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated a trend of greater use of technology for health-care staffing, according to an April report from Staffing Industry Analysts. The report projects the temporary health-care staffing segment to grow 7% this year to $21.3 billion.

The demand for health-care workers since the start of the pandemic in March 2020 exacerbated an already existing shortage of staff across the U.S.

“There was a labor market disequilibrium, and employers had not yet addressed the issues driving nurses to want to retire or return to school,” said Patricia Pittman, director of the Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity at George Washington University. “Covid factors were layered on top and made a bad situation worse.” 

According to a tool created by the institute, 17% of counties in the U.S. with intensive-care units are in staffing crisis. Over the next 30 days, 392 counties will need crisis staffing and 166 counties need contingency staffing.

Doubling Staff

Nomad said transactions on its marketplace have grown seven-fold since February 2020, and that revenue has increased five-fold. This year, revenue to date has more than doubled last year’s figures. The company didn’t cite specific figures.

With the additional capital, the company plans to double its staff of more than 160 employees. New hires include Jeff Simon as vice president of product, who previously was head of product at Indeed.com; and Kim Howard, who will serve as as chief client officer. Howard was previously senior vice president of strategic client sales at AMN Healthcare, the nation’s largest health-care staffing company.

Joining the board is Thomas Bremner of Adams Street Partners, which has $45 billion assets under management and a history of investing in companies like VillageMD, Grand Rounds and Lyra Health.

“The way this industry was working in the past, is you sit there and have zero information, and you pick up the phone of one opportunity that exists, and you start pulling together an application,” Bremner said. The process was time-intensive, and hard to scale to meet the demands of the pandemic.

He predicted the demand will be strong even post-pandemic.

“Pre-Covid travel nursing was a $4 billion industry, and demand was unrelated to Covid,” said Bremner. “There’s still going to be a rapidly aging population, there’s still people living with chronic diseases and flu seasons, and still too few nurses.”

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.