HIStalk Interviews Dan Schubert, CEO, Revuud

Dan Schubert is co-founder and CEO of Revuud of Charlotte, NC.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

Software technology has been pretty much my entire career for the last 25 years. I was a founder of a very early software-as-a-service platform in the commercial real estate industry back in the 2000 timeframe. I grew that and sold it to a large private equity firm in 2021. I started Revuud with my partner Eric Utzinger three years ago. We coined the idea in 2020 and officialized the business in 2021. The original premise for Revuud is to disrupt the staffing industry related to healthcare IT.

How do health systems engage with IT contractors?

Hospital CIOs and other hospital managers generally contract with full staffing firms, who then recruit talent or contractors who work directly for the staffing firm. The staffing firm places them with the hospital for employment. You call your recruiter, you say I need a certain kind of people for a project, and they go off and try to find people who meet the job description. They submit resumes to the health system, the health system reviews them and decides who to interview, and then they make a decision on hiring someone.

Revuud is replacing a lot of that process. You join the Revuud marketplace as a health system. Your users can search, or even better, they can create the job opportunity itself in the platform and it goes out to the entire talent database that has joined Revuud. Contractors create a profile in Revuud so they can be found for these health system job opportunities. 

There’s no need for the health system to call a staffing firm. They can simply log into Revuud, create a job opportunity, and see the results that match that  job opportunity instantly. Or they can search the talent database themselves, find the talent that they’re looking for, and then message them to set up an interview. They engage them through the platform, contract with them through the platform, and then Revuud pays the talent and we invoice the health system on a per-payroll period basis.

The workers are 1099 contractors to Revuud?

Correct. They are all 1099 contractors. We are a  gig economy platform, so it’s all about 1099 contract work.

Are most of those contractors supplementing a full-time job or are they doing gig work exclusively?

I’m not exactly sure of the percentage breakdown, but I would think that 60% to 80% are full-time contractors. The rest are full-time employed people who do contracting on the side.

How does your system make it easier for the health system to manage those contractors?

Instead of having to go through staffing agencies, we are cutting that middleman out. They log into the Revuud marketplace themselves, instantly find and recruit, and 1099 them through our platform. Revuud pays the contractor and we invoice the health system. The health system does not have to hire these people, either as a full-time employee or on a contract basis.

Do most of the contractors work remotely?

Yes. The vast majority are remote, although we do handle 1099 contractors on the platform who come on site as well.

In healthcare IT, you can only have contractors in place in the larger health systems all the time. Some of our clients have anywhere from 10 to 50 contractors on staff at any given time in their departments. Health system CIOs manage north of 100 applications at any given time. It’s normal to have contract IT workers as part of your staff.

Are health systems searching for a specific skill that makes it easy to explain what they need?

It can be that simple, but we have some pretty sophisticated AI-driven matching technology that we have developed, so that when a client’s hiring manager creates a job opportunity, it instantly matches it to qualified talents who meet the job opportunity’s requirements. They don’t even have to search because based on the job description, it instantly matches them with qualified candidates. A strength of our application is that matching, which also removes the non-qualified applicants that you would get through normal processes.

People who contract full time must always be looking for their next gig since they aren’t paid to sit on the bench. Does the platform make it easier to stay booked?

Yes. It has given contractors a platform or a marketplace, just like Uber drivers, so that they have a lot more opportunities for work. It’s the one place they can go that is specialized in their industry where they can find gig contracts to work on.

The other difference is that staffing firms no longer employ a lot of contractors on a bench. They don’t pay them when they aren’t working on contract engagements. That’s a thing of the past. Hospital systems and staffing firms, particularly staffing firms, don’t want to pay for bench time any more. It’s too costly, especially with platforms like Revuud that streamline the process and remove the human being third party from of the equation. 

Is it easy for health systems to onboard a contractor that they book through your platform?

Once that engagement is being worked on, the contractor logs into Revuud every day, or every other day, to record their time and their notes on what they worked on on that date. That gets submitted to their manager’s dashboard and reviewed for approval. There is specific time entry functionality within our application, and then the health system approves or declines that time. It’s a complete accounting package for both the contractor to manage all of their hours that they work for the different health systems through Revuud and also for the the health systems themselves, their bookkeeping on who worked on what, what they worked on on this day, how many hours they worked, and things like that. 

For the contractor, they typically have an LLC that they’ve set up. They don’t have to submit invoices to Revuud. We have detailed accounting functionality within the application for the contractors. We call the statement of work between the hospital and the contractor an engagement. That is executed through the platform electronically and approved by the talent and health system electronically. 

How do the parties arrive at a contract pay rate?

Talent contractors create their Revuud profile like they would on LinkedIn and indicate their rate and type of qualification. When the health system searches or creates a job opportunity that matches, they see the rate that the contractor is willing to accept for that work. That’s part of the hiring managers’ evaluation of who they want to hire. 

It’s a transparent environment, which is a key strength of the application. The talent indicates what they want to make on a per-hour basis and the health system can post what they want to pay for a particular job opportunity. When they match up and the talent contractor applies to the opportunity or is found during a search, they can then negotiate, decide what the agreed-upon rate is for the engagement, and then execute the contract for that particular project through the application.

It’s a transparent environment. The hospital system knows what the talent makes and what the Revuud platform makes.

Is it challenging to market the company’s services to both health systems and contractors?

It absolutely is. It’s a dual-sided marketplace. We are selling to both parties. We have resources that market to talent and attract them to the platform as well as our sales team going out and attracting health systems to go to the platform. We have functionality where talent can invite other talent resources to join the platform. Health systems can invite other health systems to join the platform.

Once the marketplace takes hold, it starts to take care of itself, where it grows organically as everyone in the platform is inviting others and making those connections happen. The more health systems that we have in the platform, the better it is to help us build the talent side of the database because more job opportunities are created. We are creating that public marketplace that allows health systems to join, talent to join, and to do gig work contracts together on their own terms.

What will be important to the company over the next three or four years?

The continued use of more technology features through the application to make the whole process much more efficient for both the talent and the health system. We’re talking about assisting our clients with the interviewing process, being the system of record for onboarding requirements, and offering health systems better analytics about their contractor pool, contractor spend, and the types of contractors they use. 

We will see a lot of advancements as has happened in other industries as Uber has done. We’re cutting out the middleman where they’re not necessary. Our intent is to make the entire process more efficient and less expensive for health systems, but at the same time, allowing talent to make more money on a per-hour basis with whatever opportunity that they want to work on. Talent on our platform are making more money than they usually do on an hourly basis, yet the health system is saving significant money, usually 20% to 30% over what they usually pay for contractor labor.  

It’s a decades-old process that we are changing and disrupting. It always takes some time. But we already have quite a few health systems that have come on board, including one of the top five health systems in the nation, that want to be those industry leaders and use technology to make things much more efficient and more organized, and at the end of the day, that also saves dollars. We’re here to take this industry that has been around for decades into the technology revolution.