ShiftMed Helps Fight Pandemic With 50,000 Vaccinated Nurses on the Front Lines
Platform’s Health Care Professionals Poised to Help Hospitals Meet Challenge Posed by Vaccine Mandate
MCLEAN, VA – November 10, 2021 – ShiftMed, one of the largest workforce management platforms in health care, announces that it has achieved a record level of vaccinated compliance by more than 50,000 members of its workforce. Following an intense program to promote credentialing and vaccine education, more than 80% of the health care workers who use ShiftMed are vaccinated across the 56 markets where the platform has a presence.
ShiftMed prepared for the vaccine mandates by developing training and education programs to complement vaccine approvals. ShiftMed partnered with the National Association of Health Care Assistants (NAHCA) and The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine (AMDA) to provide a virtual forum on the ShiftMed platform for frontline health care workers to speak directly with board certified physicians, greatly reducing vaccine hesitancy. ShiftMed built upon its education and training programs by creating a strong sense of community among its nurse workforce, providing recognition for vaccination, and developing social content that furthered the vaccine conversation, including putting a spotlight on stories about ShiftMed nurses’ loved ones impacted by COVID-19.
The platform’s vaccination milestone follows the recent announcement from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (“CMS”) that all health care workers who work in facilities receiving Medicare and Medicaid funding are required to be fully vaccinated by January 4th, 2022. Failure to comply could result in fines, denial of payment or being ejected from Medicare or Medicaid programs.
“Through our relationships with CMS and other leading government agencies, we anticipated the policy moving in this direction, so we began collecting vaccination cards and credentials in April. Our platform also supports documentation for religious and medical exemptions, allowing us to align our credentialing processes with the policies within individual health care facilities,” said Todd Walrath, CEO of ShiftMed. “There was already a shortage of nurses, but this could take an additional 30 to 35 percent of the available pool and shrink it further. Knowing that health care providers will be under immense pressure to find vaccinated workers over the next few months, we are happy that our education efforts have well exceeded national averages.”
ShiftMed is the No. 1 ranked mobile app for professionals searching for flexible nursing jobs, addressing nursing shortages and enabling hospitals to reach their required staffing levels. The platform has also been a leader in nurse education throughout the COVID-19 crisis. As one of the largest nursing communities online, the company was able to leverage its mobile, web, and social media presence to expand the conversation surrounding vaccinations in a constructive, collaborative way. In 2021, the company has hired more than 10,000 nurses, who provided over 1 million hours of care, and experienced more than 125,000 app downloads as of early November.
About ShiftMed ShiftMed is a next-generation workforce management platform that connects hospitals, assisted living providers, in-home care providers, and skilled nursing facilities, to the highest quantity and quality of licensed nurses (CNAs, LPNs and RNs). As the No. 1 nursing jobs mobile app on the App Store with over 150,000 yearly downloads, ShiftMed serves more than 1,000 enterprise health care partners across the country by offering software tools and direct access to labor for shift scheduling. The ShiftMed on-demand platform dramatically streamlines the delivery of care services and enables health care providers access to compliant, credentialed workers to fulfill their staffing needs faster than any other solution. For more information, visithttp://www.ShiftMed.com.