Trusted Inc. Raises $149M and Launches Healthcare’s Staffing Platform

Trusted Works Pioneers Totally New Approach to Help Hospitals Keep Pace With a Changing Labor Market and a Nationwide Nurse Shortage ‍

‍Trusted, Inc., the leading labor marketplace for healthcare professionals, today announced $149M in new investment. This includes a $94M Series C led by Greenspring Associates, which was recently acquired by StepStone Group, as well as a previously unannounced $55M Series B led by early investors Craft Ventures and Felicis Ventures, and brings the company’s total funding to $175M. The new investment will allow the company to accelerate the roll out of Works, a comprehensive staffing platform that helps hospitals meet one of their biggest challenges: ensuring that every shift gets filled in an environment where both demand for healthcare services and the cost of labor are increasing exponentially. After closely working with Trusted, Mercy, a top healthcare system in the U.S., is using Works to improve its entire nursing workforce and looking to increase fill rates by 12% and reduce nursing labor costs by $2M within six months. 

The launch of Works comes at a time when healthcare facilities and clinicians are being stretched to their breaking point. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the longstanding issue of nurse staffing has been exacerbated by burnout, a massive wave of retirements and the inability of nursing schools to graduate students quickly enough to meet demand. By 2022 the number of open nursing jobs will far outstrip any other profession, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicting the need for 1.1 million new RNs to avoid a further nursing shortage. 

With Works, Trusted has created a completely new model for clinical workforce management, empowering employers to create their own on-demand workforce by uniting internal and external labor sources into a single operating system, creating one source of truth for all of their staffing needs and ensuring that open shifts are filled in the most efficient manner. Works empowers employers with a true data-driven approach to staffing, helping hospitals easily react to fluctuations in demand -- driven by both predictable needs like seasonality and population growth, and unpredictable needs like callouts and spikes in acuity and census -- while providing administrators with real-time visibility and actionable insights into what was previously a “black box” experience. After the right resource has been identified, Works manages the entire employee lifecycle, from managing the onboarding and credentialing process to monitoring compliance and managing payments.

“The pandemic exacerbated what we already knew: healthcare staffing is in a crisis and previous attempts to modernize the workforce have fallen short. We’ve been left with a fragmented ecosystem of apps and services for healthcare institutions trying to solve one problem: matching the right clinician to the right role in the most efficient manner,” said Trusted CEO and Co-Founder, Lennie Sliwinski. “Through a combination of technology and close working relationships with organizations like Mercy, we’ve built a platform that is going to help hospitals meet staffing challenges head on so they can keep their focus on delivering quality patient care.”

Works was deployed at Mercy as part of an effort to build a dynamic staffing strategy that predicts and identifies the ideal mix of full-time and contingent workers across Mercy’s 40+ hospitals. Alongside workforce experts at Mercy, Trusted built an AI-driven labor optimization engine that balances fill rate and cost through predictive matching and intelligent clinician engagement across all available resources, including on-staff clinicians, local per diem, and -- if necessary -- a broader marketplace of clinicians interested in travel roles. The end-product is a next generation workforce management solution that takes the onus off of frontline managers so that they can focus on what matters most, the patient.

“The incorporation of Works into our staffing strategy allowed us to get ahead of two needs that the pandemic accelerated: giving nurses more flexibility in their careers and creating a dynamic workforce that can easily move around to meet spikes in demand,” said Betty Jo Rocchio, Mercy’s Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer. “Mercy has always been a leader in technology and innovation. Our work with and investment in Trusted has allowed us to create what I truly believe is the future of the healthcare workforce.” 

“The entire staffing supply chain in healthcare is broken and has been for some time. Trusted built its brand by focusing on one half of the equation: creating a place where nurses can take control of their job search and find flexible roles,” said StepStone Group General Partner John Avirett. “With the launch of Works, they’re bringing it all together by helping hospitals hire and manage their entire contingent workforce and we feel they are well poised to tackle the entire $1 trillion healthcare workforce market.” 

Founded by the son of a nurse in 2017, Trusted’s nurses-first mission has taken on new urgency in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to placing nurses at more than 1,500 hospitals, Trusted has doubled down on its commitment to nurses with its industry-first guaranteed quarantine pay, a partnership with The Ohio State University’s College of Nursing to provide counseling and crisis support to nurses affected by the pandemic, and a variety of mental health benefits and resources to all working nurses. The company’s Series C will be used to launch Works and grow the company’s headcount, which is expected to double by the end of 2022.