The gig economy has reached health care.
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And hospitals are increasingly turning to on-demand staffing platforms to fill critical nursing shifts.
SSM Health, which operates over 20 hospitals in the Midwest, used gig workers for almost a million hours of labor last year.
And about three-quarters of those hours were worked by independent contractor nurses, according to Seth Lovell, system vice president of nursing at SSM Health.
“We’re always, constantly, being asked, ‘Wait, so is this like Uber, but for nursing?’” Lovell said. “And in a lot of ways we’re saying yes to that.”
Lovell said SSM Health, like most big health systems, has a hard time getting enough nurses. And he expects that labor gap to grow.
“I think that obviously, it’ll be up to us to embrace strategies like on-demand to ensure that we have ample staff to safely and adequately take care of the patients,” he said.
SSM Health started using on-demand platforms to find nurses right before the pandemic hit.
Lovell said their work to get into that space was fortuitous, serving as a “lifeline” during the pandemic.
They used on-demand workers to cover about 20,000 hours in 2020. That grew to about 200,000 in 2021, and then nearly a million last year.
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