How Uniti Med uses Definitive Healthcare intelligence to identify facility staffing opportunities

Episode transcript

Hi everyone, and thanks for tuning into an episode of Customer Corner. This is the Definitive Healthcare Series that gives you a look into how companies are using the platform to grow their business. My name’s Emily De Oliveira, and I’m a Senior Product Marketing Manager here at Definitive Healthcare, and on today’s episode, I’m joined by Chris Sund, Chief Operating Officer at Uniti Med. So welcome Chris.

Thanks Emily, thanks for having us.

Well to start, could you tell me a little bit about yourself?

Well, as you said, Emily, my name’s Chris Sund, and I’m the Chief Operating Officer here at Uniti Med. We are a healthcare staffing company, and we help hospitals, long-term care facilities home health agencies, surgery centers, and any other healthcare facility whenever they need healthcare professionals.

Oh, that’s great. It sounds like Uniti sure does cover a lot of different types of healthcare organizations.

Yes we do.

And you know, there’s been quite a lot of changes in healthcare over the last few years. And so what are some of the staffing challenges you’ve seen healthcare providers face?

Oh, well, there’s been so many changes in healthcare, especially if you go back just the last two years with the pandemic. Staffing has been unfortunately a struggle in the healthcare space for many decades. There was a real shortage before the pandemic, and one of the reasons we saw, I’ll probably address that first, is that sometimes when you lose somebody in an area such as a labor and delivery nurse, or maybe it’s a lab professional, depending on the area you live in, especially a rural area, you may not have somebody that lives there that can replace them. So you can put out an ad, and you can search the surrounding areas, but if no one has went to school for that specialized area, it can be really hard to fill that, and yet, in the case of labor and delivery, people are still having babies. You still need somebody there that specialized and knows what they’re doing. So fast forward to the pandemic, and now we just added more challenges to this space. We had so many people leave the healthcare space during that time completely, because they felt overwhelmed by the situation. So between the retirement, pandemic fatigue, people leaving to help teach their kids and finding a new job that they never returned from, or the great recognition, it’s really put a much greater strain on what was already a big demand beforehand.

Yeah, that’s a really interesting perspective, and I’m also curious, are you seeing any differences depending on the site of care?

Yes, absolutely. We always see demand fluctuates. The pandemic really shined a big light on that, I remember it very early on, when it first started, in spring of 2020, hospitals started closing their doors for any planned surgeries, and what that did is, if you’re an operating room nurse, maybe a surgical tech, or a sterile processor, all of a sudden with no surgeries, you’re put on hold, they didn’t really need you. Physical therapists that were doing rehab from these surgeries all of a sudden weren’t needed, and yet the strain from not knowing what was gonna happen in getting COVID patients caused a much greater need, and a fluctuation for emergency room nurses, ICU nurses, respiratory therapists, and so the needs can fluctuate within a matter of a month or two months just based on that alone.

And so how does Uniti Med partners help?

So when a location finds themselves losing a really key healthcare professional, and there isn’t anyone in that local area that can help replace them, that’s where we come in. So what we’ll do is we’ll pull healthcare employees that wanna help out. And those people come from areas that have a greater supply, and they’re willing to travel to those areas to fill that need until they can find a permanent solution.

Well, it sounds like Uniti has been a great partner to so many organizations, especially as they navigate these challenges.

Yes, you know, the last few years, it really highlighted how lucky we are to be in a spot that we can help them, we heard from a lot of clients that were facing things they’d never seen before, people that never had issue finding a staff member when someone lost, and all of a sudden they found themselves without staff, and yet more patients than they knew how to handle, and we were able to keep the doors open at a lot of places.

Absolutely. And you had mentioned in our past conversation that bringing on Definitive Healthcare was one of the first things that you did at Uniti. So what made prioritizing healthcare commercial intelligence so important?

Oh, partying up with Definitive Healthcare early on was actually, yeah, one of the key important parts of strategy we implemented right away. It’s so important for hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare facilities to know who we are and that if they find themselves in a situation without staff that there are solutions for them. So a lot of times they don’t know who to reach out to, or where to go when all of a sudden they lose that key member, and they can’t find anyone to replace them. So using Definitive Healthcare we are able to sort facilities by geography, population, rural versus urban areas, and many other different ways to specialize what they do, and it allows us to get in front of them. So not only do we able to target our search and find those hospitals that we wanted to reach out to that would likely need us, but then using your guys’ executive function that’s built in the platform, we are able to make sure we’re getting in front of the right decision-makers, as well, and it greatly streamlined our process to build relationships with those healthcare facilities.

Oh, fantastic. And how has your experience been since using Definitive Healthcare?

We’ve had a great experience using Definitive Healthcare. There was a lot of employees when we first implemented that had already used that platform before. So when they found out we were bringing Definitive Healthcare in, they were thrilled to be able to have it again. And then for all the employees that never had Definitive Healthcare before, they have had huge success from using it. I’ve been asked so many times, you know, in our industry, you know, “Is technology going to replace what we do?” And I don’t believe so. However, I believe technology is the answer. What I like to tell people is that what we need to do is make ourselves just like the superhero Ironman. Let’s take the technology, but we are still in control. We’re still inside, but what we need to do is use Definitive so that we can use do things faster and more efficient than we’d ever be able to do if it was just us on our own.

Oh, that’s great. And I understand that you’re using our data integration services, as well. So how has that helped Uniti?

A big piece of what we do is we’re selling healthcare professional, as well, and I compare it a lot to a little bit of a blind date. If we just said, here’s this place and you should go there, and go work there, and we didn’t give them all those details, that’s really scary. It’s up to us to really break down a lot of those walls, and know as much about the facility as possible. So instead of manually looking up all that information, we are able to integrate a lot of that data over. So we’re able to tell them the size of the facility, and what type of units they have, and what to expect, to really take that overwhelmingness outta there, and it also saved our internal employees a great amount of time, because without that they would be using search tools, and there’s no way of knowing if even that data was even correct.

That is great to hear that you’ve been able to really reduce some of those manual processes, and just help your team be more efficient with getting that important intelligence directly from your system.

Yes, thank you.

Well, fantastic. Well, before we wrap up, I have one last question. How has Definitive Healthcare been impactful to your organization?

Definitive Healthcare has made such a huge impact on our organization, because it allowed us to bring our services to thousands of facilities across the nation. To do what we did and get our brand out there without that tool would’ve taken us so long. And a lot of people that really needed help right there in the moment and didn’t know where to turn to were able to find out what we do, and we were able to save them. So definitive healthcare, you know, they really helped us identify unique opportunities in the healthcare space, and when it mattered the most, we were able to find the right point of contacts.

Oh, well, I’m so happy to hear that it’s really helped identify providers in need of your valuable services so that they can, you know, overcome their staffing challenges, and focus on delivering that highest quality care to their patients.

Yes, it’s been amazing, thank you.

Well, thank you Chris so much for taking the time to chat with me today. I also wanna thank the audience for tuning into Customer Corner today. If you’d like to share your story on the show, you can reach out to us at marketing@definitivehc.com, and you can visit our website to learn more about how other companies are using the platform to create commercial success. Thanks everyone.