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00:00:01
The Unicorn Making Employers Apply to Nurses I Incredible Health CEO Dr. Iman Abuzeid
38 Plays2 months ago
In this episode, we sit down with Iman Abuzeid, physician turned founder and CEO of Incredible Health, the $1.7B AI-powered platform transforming how nurses get hired in the U.S. We explore how a broken hiring system—and not a lack of workers—sits at the center of healthcare’s staffing crisis.
We discuss why healthcare faces one of the most severe labor shortages in the country, despite being its largest employer. Iman shares how a failed first startup helped her find a clearer North Star and led to building a two-sided marketplace where employers apply to nurses. We also break down how Incredible Health is embedding AI into hiring—from AI career agents that help nurses prepare for interviews to AI interviewers that dramatically speed up hospital hiring timelines. Finally, we examine why AI in healthcare works best when it changes job descriptions rather than replacing people—and what that means for the future of healthcare work.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Healthcare Theory Podcast. I'm your host, Nikhil Reddy, and every week we interview the entrepreneurs and thought leaders behind the future of healthcare care to see what's gone wrong with our system and how we can fix it.
00:00:15
Speaker
Today's guest is Dr. Aman Abouzid, a physician turned founder and the CEO of Incredible Health, a multi-billion dollar healthcare career platform used by over a million nurses in thousands of hospitals across the U.S. And Aman herself is tackling one of the most acute problems in healthcare care today.
00:00:32
Speaker
staffing. Staffing right now is structurally broken. And not only do we get into that, but through startup Incredible Health, which is known for flipping the traditional hiring model by having employers apply to nurses.
Career Transition and Startup Challenges
00:00:43
Speaker
And more recently, they've been building AI directly into the hiring process using AI agents called Gail and Lynn. So hi, Aman. Thank you so much for coming on to the healthcare theory and and welcome to the podcast.
00:00:54
Speaker
Thank you so for having me. Of course, we're really excited to get into Incredible Health today, but I want to take it back a little bit. I mean, in a Masters of Scale episode, you noted that your first startup kind of and left you kind of stuck in the middle of the ocean.
00:01:08
Speaker
And i want I really love that metaphor. And I would love to hear what was the story behind your first venture and how did that change kind of guide you towards the pivot point you found today with Incredible Health? Okay, great. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this podcast and answering and answering all the questions. um Just a little bit but of background on myself, because it'll help with the answer is like, I'm an MD by background.
00:01:30
Speaker
um I don't practice as a doctor anymore. I've been in software for the last 12 years of my career, and co founded incredible health eight years ago. And so yeah, you're you're absolutely right that the first startup I worked on did not work. um And what what happened there is, so I met my co-founder, Roan Portlock, at an early stage healthcare technology startup.
00:01:53
Speaker
ah I was a product manager, he was a software engineer. And so we left, teamed up to start to work on our first business. um And that first business did not work. What it was, was like a patient engagement platform that helped um physical therapists and chiropractors and, you know, healthcare workers that own their own businesses engage and retain their patients. Right.
00:02:15
Speaker
And for a whole set of reasons, it did not work. And we really, we struggled to find product market fit and at the in the end, pivoted to what is now incredible health.
00:02:26
Speaker
I think some of the lessons I learned there is how important it is to have a very clear North Star. What I mean by that is how it's really important to invest heavily in ideation before you actually execute on
Origins and Staffing Challenges
00:02:41
Speaker
anything.
00:02:41
Speaker
um ah For example, like really understanding what is the market size, who are the competitors, and then most importantly, like what have you come up with that's at least ten x better, faster, more compliant, like whatever it is, right, than what's already out there. And because that's the only way to really to really cut through all the noise of all the solutions that are out there.
00:03:04
Speaker
um And I wish, in hindsight, I wish we had spent more time just on the ideation piece. and ah And because ultimately, we just it is i feel like it is like a ship leaving harbor. Like you want to make sure that you're pointed in the right direction. Otherwise, you're going to end up in the middle of nowhere.
00:03:23
Speaker
Of course. And I think it's people really emphasize speed in today's world startup world. And I think like you want to have speed. You want to be able to iterate quickly, but you still don't want to skip the step of ideating and seeing, like you mentioned, where the North Star could go.
00:03:36
Speaker
And I mean, specifically with Incredible Health, we'd love to hear a bit more about the pain point. you guys are solving because of course healthcare care staffing at first to me almost didn't seem like an issue or a lot of people didn't seem like an issue because there's a lot of healthcare care workers and our family, friends and groups, healthcare organizations are huge employers, but I mean empiricists can be deceiving. And oftentimes as you as you know, there's a lot, is a huge supply shortage in healthcare. care um But I mean, why does that gap here? Like, how'd you learn about this? And what are some of like the ripple effects that you see kind of go throughout hospitals and the rest of our healthcare system?
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, so the way this all started is, ah so we were in the middle of pivoting. And ah during that time, the idea for Incredible Health like was starting to simmer, right? So a lot of my family members and friends are doctors who do practice, and they were always complaining about understaffing, right? Like, my for example, my two older brothers were surgeons, often saying that,
00:04:30
Speaker
We don't have enough staff to to to get yeah the surgeries done in a timely manner and so on. um And then at the same time, ah Rome, my co-founder and chief technology officer, he was who's a total whiz, by the way, MIT software engineer, um he has many family members that are nurses.
00:04:47
Speaker
And they would they were they would say, I'm experienced and I'm qualified and I applied to 10 places and I usually don't even hear back. And we were like, okay, this doesn't make any sense. Right. And so we just started to dig into it more and more. And um like healthcare is the largest employment sector in the U S in terms of the number of Americans that are employed.
00:05:05
Speaker
And it's actually projected to add another 2.6 million jobs in the next few years too. But at the same time, like you said, like there's a major labor shortage. it is It is a top labor shortage in the country is in health care.
00:05:17
Speaker
um Our demand for health care as a country continues to increase because our population is aging and and our population is growing and that's putting more and more demand on the health care system. But we haven't done a great job of like increasing the supply of health care workers, which is why there's such massive shortages.
Systemic Solutions for Staffing Shortages
00:05:34
Speaker
um the Just to put some numbers around this, like the World Health Organization projects 11 million healthcare care workers short globally by 2030.
00:05:45
Speaker
And in the US s alone, it's over a million expected to be short in in the next year. right um And so we've also done a lot of studies and surveys of the healthcare workers on our platform. And 71% of technicians and 61% of nurses say that understaffing is directly hurting their ability to do their jobs.
00:06:03
Speaker
um I know a lot of us, you know, we have healthcare care workers in our family, we have healthcare workers that are friends. I mean, they're pretty tired when you talk to them. They are getting overworked. So like they they feel the stress, the burnout is real um for this for this workforce too.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah. And it more isn't always is isn't always better in some ways. Like I think, for example, when you think about this problem, there's not enough supply, there's lots of demand. You think it's it's pretty easy. That's just like increase the supply, right? Like simple economics.
00:06:34
Speaker
um But oftentimes, as you know, it's it's different to catch up and difficult to catch up in that way. And i mean, you've hinted at a couple of things before about like nursing schools and the amount of like staff they have there. But and what are those like deep blockers that make it so to increase this? Because at first, it seems like it could just be a policy issue. Just fix that real quick. We're all good. But of course, there's deep supply demand issues here. So what what does that look like from your perspective? Yeah. So when you dig deeper into the problem, um you actually discover there's actually several forces converging at once, right?
00:07:06
Speaker
Um, we, yeah I mentioned the aging population, which increases the demand. Um, but at the happening at the same time is that 20% of us healthcare care workers are actually born or born outside of the United States.
00:07:20
Speaker
And we all know our immigration policies, like haven't changed that much since 2016. And like, we haven't been very forward with increasing the number of immigrants in general, but especially in healthcare, care um, in the last decade. Right.
00:07:35
Speaker
So we're not getting any relief from that pipeline. um There's also nursing schools and other you know allied health technician schools and so on that can only admit a limited number of applicants um because they have staff they have faculty shortages and um and they can't graduate as many RNs as needed.
00:07:57
Speaker
um So all of that is all happening at the same time, right? and As a result, so the impact is for hospitals and healthcare employers, their time to fill just keeps extending. The average right now is over 80 days to fill a specialized experienced nurse role, um which is, you know, when you think about it, that's almost three months um of a role being open. And and during that time, the the or the employer is spending on temporary labor, on overtime costs, on in incentive pay, you know, like this they're putting all these other tactics in place to solve that problem one in the short term.
00:08:32
Speaker
And then for the workers, you know, they feel like job searches are fragmented and very isolating and stressful. um You know, they i apply to 10 places and I don't even hear back. You know, you hear that all the time.
00:08:45
Speaker
They don't have enough career support. There's long stretches of silence from when when they when they apply. um And then some of them just. give up entirely on the job search too and ultimately i think this does affect the american people and the patients right because when you don't have enough staff you know the patient care that you're you're delivering on is going to be compromised and there's going to be a quality impact too And I think, and i want I want to get into that a little bit because of course we have these structural issues.
00:09:13
Speaker
You can impact it from a policy perspective and incredible how little interestingly guys are of course using software, built marketplace and of course now AI to approach and tackle this problem. And I think it seems a little bit contrarian and really exciting. Like right now,
00:09:27
Speaker
Most people, like um like and nurses are applying to employers, but you guys have kind of flipped that script where employers apply to nurses, which is a pretty radical flip of that whole process. And I'd love to hear, how did you decide? i like What were the first principles behind this like early marketplace model you guys started with?
00:09:42
Speaker
And why did you think that would work better in hiring? Were there any skeptics? And and what did that look like in the beginning? Yeah, absolutely. So Incredible Health is a two-sided marketplace. And we have healthcare workers on one side and we have employers on the other. We've grown to 1.5 million US healthcare workers.
00:09:59
Speaker
ah That's one in two nurses in the country or is now on our platform. And we work with 1,500 US healthcare employers. And that includes very big health systems like Tenant Health, Trinity Health, um also many academic medical centers like Johns Hopkins and York Presbyterian and and NYU and and many others, and then many community hospitals too.
00:10:19
Speaker
And so to your point, like, yeah one of our sort of claims to fame, especially in the early days, is that the employers apply to them and to the healthcare care workers instead of the other way around. And the healthcare care workers absolutely love that. Nurses love that. Because they would create a profile, they sit back and relax, they get interview requests from different employers, and they get to choose which interviews to accept or decline.
00:10:37
Speaker
I think the first principles that was going on here is that we had a belief that healthcare, if we can put healthcare professionals in the driver's seat and in control of what's happening here, then we can probably drive more efficiency, more matches and more, more success.
00:10:54
Speaker
um We also sort of got away with that because there's a big supply demand imbalance, right? If there, if that labor shortage didn't exist, I don't think we would have been able to do a tactic like that of employers applying to the healthcare care workers instead of the other way around.
00:11:07
Speaker
um And so that really just, it was really about, you know, it was an idea that that supported our vision and mission as well. You know, our vision is to help healthcare professionals live better lives. And the mission
Innovative Hiring Models
00:11:19
Speaker
is to help them find and do their best work. And so we just want to make sure we put the healthcare care workers in the best position possible to pursue the opportunities that they want and their dream roles. And so they can have like a fulfilling career.
00:11:31
Speaker
Yeah. And I would love to hear, I think it's, it's very helpful. Of course, you have that supply issue. So it's it a problem is also kind of helping your solution at the same time. But of course, building a marketplace that spans the entire continental United States at once is very difficult um because people are like, maybe you get a job in New York wants to interview you, but you're in California. It's hard to do that. um So I'd love to hear. I mean, I think you guys had a very localized process, kind of like Uber and DoorDash start with geographic constraints to build a marketplace there and then expand.
00:12:00
Speaker
um But what did that look like, though? And what market did you pick? And what was the strategy behind that like kind of local first approach? um It almost seems like an easier to go to the entire market instead of being selective about where you start.
00:12:12
Speaker
Yeah. So when it comes to real world marketplaces, like two-sided marketplaces that have an actual experience and service that's in the real world, um it's a classic tactic to restrain or restrict your marketplace geographically.
00:12:27
Speaker
And that that is that is something that we did as well. um we When we started in 2017, we were only in um in California. And that allowed us to get supply and demand, so both the employers and the healthcare workers at the same time, so we could get so we can more easily overcome the chicken and egg problem.
00:12:47
Speaker
And by restraining it geographically, it was much we could really concentrate our attention, resources, so on on this like mini marketplace, say. um And so we'd expanded to 150 hospitals in California before even thinking about going to any other states. Yeah.
00:13:03
Speaker
Even by the end of 2019, we were only in California and Texas. um In 2019 is when the series A happened, um which Andreessen Horowitz led. And that's when we were able to to expand more rapidly, more nationally.
00:13:19
Speaker
um the other The other important piece of this is that when you're building a marketplace and restraining it geographically, like you're going to encounter a lot of problems when you start up our marketplace, right? like There's going to be product There's going to be operations issues. So you want to like make sure you address your problems in ah in a constrained market first but so you don't replicate your problems across the entire country because then they're going to be a lot harder to solve if it's you know if your problems are spread out across the entire country.
00:13:49
Speaker
Yeah. and i think one other thing, it's it definitely makes sense to start smaller because, yeah, you can kind of almost manufacture the experience you want better and then scale that up. but And one thing that kind of sets Incredible Health apart, which I really love, is that you guys are focusing exclusively on permanent hires for nurses. And there's this huge travel nurse market, temp staffing market. It's a little bit fickle at times, but it's it's still like a real demand there. But and what was reason behind that decision? Because, of course,
00:14:15
Speaker
It's the full-time nurses that often are like the backbone of our healthcare system. They're extremely important, but they undergo probably the most trouble with finding a job. So what does that look like? Why start with them and and why exclusively work with them?
00:14:28
Speaker
Yeah, we've we've since day one have only focused on permanent healthcare workers. So so they could be full-time, part-time, per diem workers, but they are always employees of the health system or or the healthcare care employer that's hiring them.
00:14:42
Speaker
um we really stayed away from temporary labor. ah The reasons for that is, number one, we just wanted to be as lined as we can with our users, right? So if you're a nurse or any healthcare worker, you are spending and you have a 30, 40 year long so career, you are spending the majority of that time as a permanent worker, right? They're like you and i they're like they've got homes, kids, like they they want permanent employment, right? um As opposed to changing jobs every three months.
00:15:13
Speaker
And then ah for the employers, it was important strategically as well. I mean, they but their permanent workers are the backbone of their workforce and they believe that their workforce should have the majority of it, like 95% of it should be permanent workers.
00:15:29
Speaker
it's ah There's also a lot of data and research that shows that ah when you have permanent workers, your quality of care is actually improved, right? Because in healthcare, and healthcare care we work together as teams and we know each other's processes and preferences and and you know the team dynamic is just healthier if the workers aren't changing
AI Integration in Hiring Processes
00:15:47
Speaker
every you know every few months.
00:15:48
Speaker
um So ah that was honestly probably the main reason. We just wanted to be strategically aligned with users on both sides. And I think like that problem of incentives like stretches so far in healthcare. course, for solutions like yours, even just the larger infrastructure solutions in terms of like what system is best. And I think part of that, something that you guys have been working on, I think that really fits within that ethos is me just building ai um Because ai it almost in some ways can benefit everybody by just ideally providing a better patient outcome, making easier for nurses.
00:16:21
Speaker
um But I mean, where does AI fit within that core infrastructure of like, hiring and and staffing and all in that front of things, like what, what was the principles behind that? And was that always part of the long-term vision or something that as LMS became more popular something you guys thought was a good idea? Yeah. I mean, for us, this started when chat GPD came out and that's when the team started to experiment with a lot, a lot of, uh,
00:16:44
Speaker
ah AI features and and the LLMs in particular were were very meaningful for us. um And that's when we started to uncover the potential of what AI could do um for healthcare workers and for healthcare employers and what it could do in our marketplace too. um we've ah So we've been building AI features for several years now and um the technology has gotten to a point where it can deliver meaningful value.
00:17:12
Speaker
It's not just like a novelty factor. And ah we've now able to now we've now been able to train our models on you know millions of data points from the marketplace, right? Because we have such a robust you know marketplace with so many healthcare workers and employers. And that's continued to enhance the quality and accuracy of the AI that we provide. um really we saw ai as an opportunity to improve the hiring experience and to provide even more support to the healthcare workers and set them up for success and to help ah ah the healthcare employers improve their hiring experiences too.
00:17:48
Speaker
And so specifically what we did most recently is we built two AI voice agents, one named Gail and one named Lynn. Gail is named after Florence Nightingale. And Gail is a lifelong career partner for healthcare workers available 24 seven. And it's a voice agent. It helps um it helps healthcare care workers prepare for interviews. It helps them create resumes.
00:18:11
Speaker
It helps them just confidently navigate new career opportunities. And we also have Lynn named after Marilyn Gaston, who's a physician researcher who did a lot of work in single cell anemia. So Lynn is an AI interview agent for employers.
00:18:25
Speaker
um And Lynn is able to do a full interview, including selling the employee value proposition as well. um And just delivering a high quality experience for the applicants so they don't get stuck in in leaky pipelines and mismatches, and and they're not constrained by recruiter bandwidth. Like, Lynn really enhances the hiring experience for both the healthcare workers and for the employers too.
00:18:50
Speaker
And I'd love to hear what is adoption? like how how are you guys approaching adoption? Because I think if you had this product 10 years ago, someone might think it's a scam, like, hey, I can't do that. And now with LLMs, people in their everyday lives are starting to see how powerful it can be. But still, I think from my perspective, at least doctors,
00:19:07
Speaker
clinicians, nurses tend to be little averse to technology, which is understandable. Um, in medicine, you're not really told to take risks as much. And I think AI is something that is, is, is very risky in some ways you can go wrong with it. So when you're talking to nurses and talking to people working for hospitals and admin people, what does that conversation look like? And what it is it like, how are you getting past the hesitancy to use like tools like ai Yeah. So just to share some early data from us, um,
00:19:36
Speaker
90% of nurses give Gail, the AI voice agent Gail, which is a lifelong career partner that does the interview preparation, 90% of them give it a thumbs up and would recommend it to their peers. And there's two reasons why they're saying that. Number one is that they love the 24-7 convenience.
00:19:50
Speaker
And 50% of the interview preparation sessions that Gail does are actually happening nights and weekends. So outside of business hours. um And then the second thing they've they've been saying is that they feel less nervous.
00:20:04
Speaker
practicing with an AI voice agent than with a human. We have human interview prep available as well. um And that's been really interesting because, you know, they they say a human is a lot more likely to judge them.
00:20:15
Speaker
And an AI voice agent is less, is is a robot, so it's not going to judge me. And we're seeing these results across all generations of nurses. This is not just ah a millennial and Gen Z phenomenon. Even the older nurses are are are sharing these, are, you know, sharing these results too.
00:20:30
Speaker
Um, And then, so I think part of what's going on here is that ai is becoming, and the and the tools, AI tools are becoming more and more mainstream, right? So increasingly all of us, including the healthcare workers are using AI in our personal lives and increasingly using it in our professional lives too.
00:20:48
Speaker
So it's, it's not as, an I guess, as novel as it used to be. Right. And for the employers, I mean, they are just under enormous pressure.
00:20:59
Speaker
You know, there are enormous cost pressures going on in healthcare right now, um including reductions in Medicare cost, Medicare revenue and Medicaid revenue. including just just ongoing pressures from payers.
00:21:12
Speaker
Like the running a hospital and or running any kind of healthcare employee healthcare you know system right now is not easy. And so they are looking for solutions that can drive more speed, more quality and lower costs, right?
00:21:25
Speaker
And ah the benefit of of the AI voice agents like Lynn is it has an impact on speed. So instead of waiting four days, to complete, to to to interview with someone you can, you know, Lynn can now interview same day, right?
00:21:40
Speaker
um As soon as you apply, which is a 20% reduction in the hiring timelines on the quality piece, we're thinking about the candidate experience, like in today's world without AI, maybe recruiting teams can speak with 10% of the applicants and everyone else is like either not hearing back or getting a rejection email.
00:21:57
Speaker
Like imagine a world where an AI voice interview agent is able to interview a hundred percent of the applicants, right? And so everyone finds out more about your organization. And then on the cost side, I mean, this has meaningful productivity improvements for HR teams in particular, and for hiring managers, like the nursing leaders and so on. um ah We estimate at least 800 hours saved per nurse recruiter ah per year. That's one to two months of their time per year, right?
00:22:23
Speaker
And the way we're thinking about, the way, you know, the leaders we work with are thinking about this is, this is really just about changing the job job description of what a recruiter does. you know um we We need to free up recruiter time to spend time with hiring managers, to build to go on site, to build long-term candidate pipelines, whereas the work of doing five to 10 phone screens every single day can now be handled by an AI voice interview agent. right So on on these in important areas of speed, quality of the experience, and costs, like AI has a meaningful impact.
00:22:56
Speaker
And I think it's it also is very interesting because as you've mentioned before, ah there's ah almost half the nursing population the United States is using um Incredible Health. But also now that you guys are addressing two sides of the stakeholder market, I think Incredible Health now is a lot of more responsibility because in a marketplace, you're pairing different people together. But with Gail, for example, um you have almost direct...
00:23:18
Speaker
really direct influence in terms of how a nurse presents themselves. ah The other side, Lynn, you have a really direct influence in terms of what Lynn looks for in a nurse. And I think part of that provides a lot our responsibility in terms of what is that like relationship between nurses and employers.
00:23:32
Speaker
So when you're building solutions like this, like how do you, as as you mentioned earlier, align incentives and ensure that like nurses and employers can like work well together in a way that's like frictionless as opposed to kind of the system we're seeing in past tense where it's just like very hard to deal with.
00:23:46
Speaker
And a recruiters are like bogged down in their time a lot. Yeah. um You know, we think about this topic a lot. um Look, at the end of the day, whether you're building, ah whether we're building products with AI or without AI, we just have to provide value, right? And when we think about, like, if we focus on the healthcare worker for a moment, like the job search experience is a highly stressful experience. Okay. Like it is, i think, I think anything, the only thing that's more stressful is dating actually. Right. So this is like number two yeah in terms of just human experiences that we all have. Like, and at the end of the day, there isn't a lot out there supporting them.
00:24:25
Speaker
There just isn't. And so Gail comes along and Gail AI voice agent comes along and says like, I will practice this interview with you as many times as you like. any Every time you answer a question, it's going to give you feedback. At the end of the session, it's going to give you a summary.
00:24:40
Speaker
30% of nurses start their job search without a high quality resume because no one's told them how to what what a high quality resume even is. How would they know, right? Exactly. And like you can't get into any of these organizations without a resume.
00:24:52
Speaker
And one third of them don't have high quality resumes. And so then along comes Gail, an ai an AI agent that's helping them create resumes so they're not locked out of the entire system. and So at the end of the day, it really just comes down to making sure that the the product you're building is truly addressing an emotional need and ah and and ah and a real need for for your users.
00:25:15
Speaker
um And i sort of really shy away from like, or I disagree strongly with this whole premise around like AI is just bad for health in healthcare. care AI is going to be replacing jobs and things like that. Like, is AI going to have an impact on employment? Like in other industries? Possibly. i mean, like,
00:25:35
Speaker
Apparently 13% of entry-level roles have been like eliminated since ChatGPT came out. Again, it's correlate unclear with the correlate if there's if that's a true correlation or causation. like It could just be like you know our economy is just not doing that well. um But healthcare is different.
00:25:50
Speaker
It's one of it's a sector that's hiring. It's a sector that has made shortages. And it's one of these rare industries where AI is helping people find jobs and helping set set them up for success and helping employers too.
00:26:05
Speaker
Yeah, and I actually would love to hear a little more about that. So let's just last week, one of our guests was Dr. Pott, who is the um chair for the FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee. And she really talked about how she sees AI not as a replacement for people, but as like an Ironman suit almost. So like kind of enabling them to achieve more.
00:26:22
Speaker
do things better and do things the way they love to. But it's also a very fine line between almost like replacing people and enabling people. And I would love to hear from your perspective, like how do you kind of go about that line and ensure that your products, like what, is I mean, what is your thesis behind AI and how do you go about building AI that's able to enable people without like removing the human part of healthcare, care which is of course like kind of at the heart of it all.
00:26:46
Speaker
Yeah. Um, I sort of agree with ah the premise that your, your guest said, um, I think your guest said Iron Man suit. I would put it even simpler that and that AI is just changing all our job descriptions.
00:27:01
Speaker
great um yeah What a recruiter or a nurse does in 2024 is going to be different in 2026. don't those roles are going anywhere, but what they do day to day is changing.
00:27:16
Speaker
yeah The recruiter example is they do not need to do five or 10 interviews every single day anymore. But they got to fill that time with other stuff that should have been happening as well, which is you know the building the long-term Canada pipelines, building relationships with hiring managers and so on. um I think that like at the end of the day, like but i have quite a bit of I've also had a a lot of experience with this because we've implemented AI quite intensely internally too And there's been a mandate like all year to like, ah to embrace AI for all of our teams at Incredible Health.
00:27:53
Speaker
And um there's been goals around the number of ai agents and workflows you need to build internally for your own work. I'm i'm referring to the engineering team, the operations team, the sales team and so on. um And what I've seen in the last 12 months is is just a change to each person's job description.
00:28:14
Speaker
ah It's not like the roles have gone away. but the But what they do day to day has changed. And there is there still continues to be a really important human element to all of this.
00:28:25
Speaker
um There are many AI ah laws now by state and as it relates to hiring. um So AI, so for example, the States of New York and Texas and Illinois and California have all published like AI laws related to hiring, which pretty much say AI is not cannot make hiring decisions. Like that's a summary.
00:28:47
Speaker
And so at the end of the day, it's not like AI is going to be deciding who's getting hired. Like a human still going to have decide who's moving forward, who's goingnna get
Future Goals and Entrepreneurial Insights
00:28:56
Speaker
hired. But AI can definitely have a major impact on the entire experience.
00:29:01
Speaker
Yeah, and i'm I think I 100% agree with that. I think that a i it is it is a fine line, but there there's going to be so much progress like that AI can achieve if we just embed it in more and more workflows.
00:29:13
Speaker
And i'd love love couple last couple of questions here. i'd love to hear... what your long-term vision looks like for incredible health. I mean, you started as a marketplace, still do that, of course, now you're building AI agents to enable both sides of that marketplace to do their jobs better and and find their jobs better. But um what are some of the major steps in the roadmap to make your vision a reality for incredible health? And what does that look like in the future, the next three, five, maybe 10 years?
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah. So our vision at incredible health hasn't changed. It's been the same since 2017. Um, And that is to help healthcare professionals live better lives. And the mission is to help them find and help healthcare professionals find and do their best work.
00:29:52
Speaker
So our ah our goal is to be, you know we are market leaders. You know, we were the first healthcare career marketplace to add AI. um We're also market leaders in terms of just the size of our marketplace as well.
00:30:06
Speaker
um So, you know, we want to continue to to lead this industry in terms of innovation and progress and impact we can have. on healthcare care workers and you know and healthcare employers too.
00:30:18
Speaker
um So certainly in our roadmaps is a lot more AI ah coming as well. um Expansion to other groups of healthcare workers continues as well.
00:30:29
Speaker
um And ultimately just continuing to drive value to both to both groups of users that we have. um are ah Our goal is to continue to be market leaders and to continue to innovate and bring the latest technology to this to this industry.
00:30:45
Speaker
Yeah, and all I know about being market leaders, mean, Credible Health is at a really, really incredible journey. um a million healthcare care workers on the platform, as you mentioned, a great valuation. but um So kind of like a far cry from when you guys started. But I'd love to hear, i mean, you kind of talk about job descriptions changing. i mean, as a founder, like how do you view the role of a founder changing in the future? And especially, i would also love to hear that what are some of the biggest lessons you've learned from like this almost like, I assume to be a rollercoaster ride. Like what is your advice for the next generation?
00:31:13
Speaker
generation of entrepreneurs and people exploring this part of healthcare. um How do you feel about all that? Yeah. um I have a lot of thoughts on this topic in in general, what I would say to any worker, whether you're a founder or not, um you need to embrace AI.
00:31:29
Speaker
Like the world has changed. The world has changed and embracing AI in your day-to-day work is a requirement. um I can share even just for us, like when it comes to interviewing team members for our company, there are now questions, interview questions related to the use of AI. We ask them to screen share, Claude and and other, and ChatGPT and so on to solve cases. Like we expect ah that skill to to be ah prevalent with every role that we we hire for.
00:31:56
Speaker
And that is happening across the tech, certainly the technology industry, but i would expect it to happen in all industries too. um So your your job, I don't believe that AIs are necessarily going to replace you know a bunch of knowledge workers, but if you don't learn the AI skills, you will be replaced, right? like So so this is this yeah you have to embrace it, whether you like it or not.
00:32:19
Speaker
um A client a ah client of mine once said, ah make sure make sure you're at the dinner table. And if you're not, you're on the menu, right? Yeah. That was a funny funny analogy, but but real. you know um I think the ah as far as just the founder thing goes, um there's a couple of things that I would say. ah Number one is that it it is definitely is a roller coaster ride. Like there are a lot of ups and downs in entrepreneurship.
00:32:48
Speaker
And so the you know number the number one job is to manage your own psychology. And so and just make sure you have a really good support system to get you through the what, what for in in our case and the case of many other founders, is it can be a decades long experience.
00:33:02
Speaker
um That could be your friends, your family, your therapist, your executive coach, your whoever. Just make sure you have an entire support network around you and of course your other fellow CEOs and founders um because this this journey does have a lot of ups and downs.
00:33:17
Speaker
um The second thing i'd say is just to have is what I mentioned earlier around the ideation piece. um knowing what to build is just like a hundred x more important than building it right like it is just you have to be headed in the right direction so understand your market understand your customers understand the potential and really figure out insights for your product that are you know 10x better than what's already out there and then my final piece of advice is for those that are building specifically in healthcare
00:33:54
Speaker
Healthcare can be a little bit deceiving sometimes because there's very lofty missions of all the you know customers that we serve. um At the end of the day, one of the most important things you need to figure out as a healthcare entrepreneur is the business model.
00:34:08
Speaker
um The incentives and the dollars and cents and the way money flows in healthcare is very complicated in the US. And... ensuring that you have a meaningful, a business model that makes sense and delivers a clear return on investment is so important in healthcare. in in I would argue it's even more important than the product itself sometimes.
00:34:30
Speaker
And so being very buttoned up there it matters matters a lot in in this industry. Yeah, I definitely
Conclusion and Engagement Resources
00:34:38
Speaker
really agree with lot of those, especially the last point. I think that this whole system is like has a layer about like everyone wants to help health care. But beneath that, the business model, they interlock together, they to work together well.
00:34:49
Speaker
um But I also love your other point. I think, like, of course, it's not just about like building a great product. It's about like adding in it. It's not just like similarly like. It's not just about like answering questions, but asking the right questions. And I think it's a very interesting concept. And I think i've I'd love to see, I'd love seeing how Incredible Health has done this so far, of course, being able target a very specific area in the market and of course, build that out to touch more and more stakeholders.
00:35:13
Speaker
ah nurses are like the backbone of our healthcare system. So the more we can help them do their jobs and help them get get jobs too um is a better system for all of us. So really appreciate your time again, I'm on just coming on today, walking through your story and just kind of empathizing with the experience of nurses and how your products helping them out. So um really appreciated the time today so far.
00:35:34
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you as well. And yeah, this was a great session.
00:35:41
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Healthcare Theory. Every Tuesday, expect a new episode on the platform of your choice. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, any streaming platform you can imagine.
00:35:53
Speaker
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00:36:05
Speaker
Repeat, thehealthcaretheory.org. Again, i appreciate you tuning in and I hope to see you again soon.