“This is a brilliant idea,” Alexi Nazem thought when first heard about Nomad Health. A short time later he agreed to become the company’s CEO.
The idea Nazem found so compelling was a platform through which healthcare professionals interested in pursuing temporary work could find hospitals needing short-term staff. Most hospitals and practices found temporary physicians through brokers and agencies; a process neither physicians nor their employers found efficient or satisfying. Nomad promised to provide a clean solution that would make the experience more transparent and less costly.
Nomad was the brainchild of two Yale neurosurgeons/entrepreneurs, Max Laurans and Ryan Grant. After researching the temporary healthcare market, Grant and Laurans sketched out how Nomad should function and enlisted some software engineers to build a prototype. They also recruited Kevin Ryan, a well-known serial entrepreneur, to be the lead investor. Ryan in turn recruited Nazem.
With a functioning web site and management team in place, Nomad’s leadership faced their biggest challenge – simultaneously finding sufficient physicians to attract hospital clients and finding enough hospitals to attract physicians. No matter how compelling their value proposition or attractive their web site, the Nomad team realized that they needed large numbers of participants from both sides of the market before the concept would work.
Published Date: 28/06/2017
Suggested Citation: Greg Licholai, Ayesha Khalid, and Jaan Elias, "Nomad Health: The disruption of physician staffing services," Yale SOM Case 17-013, June 28, 2017
Keywords: Customer/Marketing; Employee/HR; Entrepreneurship; Healthcare