“If we as a country want to deliver high-quality care, we have to have enough workers in the necessary positions,” says Incredible Health founder Dr. Iman Abuzeid. She has set out to solve the understaffing problem that plagues hospitals across the country.
Her company, Incredible Health, offers a platform that connects hospitals and staff in a novel way. By having hospitals and other employers apply for pre-approved workers, Abuzeid’s system speeds up the employment process and improves employee retention rates.
“You must have 100% confidence,” says Abuzeid. “But if you also have 100% competence then you’re unstoppable.”
Iman Abuzeid responds to medical staffing crises
Abuzeid has intimate familiarity with the world of medicine. She herself is a doctor, and comes from a family of doctors. So when she saw first-hand the staffing issues in the medical world, she chose to forego residency and turn to a more large-scale project.
After graduating medical school, Abuzeid worked on multiple projects, including treatment and prevention of blindness in the Middle East, managing collaborations between hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, analytics of the economic value of vaccines, and more. Then, after an MBA at the Wharton School of Business, she joined AliveCor, which gave her a chance to “learn about the product” as a wannabe entrepreneur.
With this experience under her belt, Abuzeid founded Incredible Health. First, she saw ways to radically improve the staffing situation in hospitals. But she also saw an opportunity to prove herself and act as a role model.
“I have to go out there and win,” she tells CNBC. “I have to make that hire, close that deal, and try to fix this unjust system through my actions. My goal is to provide another counternarrative to the idea that black founders can’t IPO and that we can’t be successful.”
Changing the hiring process for the better
Abuzeid comes from a family of serial entrepreneurs and doctors. “Both my grandfathers were entrepreneurs, and they’re influential in my life,” she says. One of her grandfathers founded Sudan’s first transportation company. The other worked as a merchant, farmer, and real estate manager.
Her father grew up in a poor village in Sudan and is now an ENT. Both of her older brothers are surgeons. Abuzeid herself trained as a medical doctor in the UK, although she turned away from one-on-one healthcare and decided to tackle systemic healthcare issues instead.
“I realized how much more of an impact you can have if you operate at a system-level,” she explains. “I wanted to have an impact on a macro scale. There are so many things – access, operations, and more – that if improved, can make a huge impact in health care.”
Born in Saudi Arabia, Abuzeid identifies as Sudanese, trained in the UK, and immigrated to the US in 2009. “This country views entrepreneurs so positively and there are entire ecosystems to support those entrepreneurs,” she explains about her motivation for the move. “There’s something about the American culture and its system that makes it the best place in the world to start a company.”
Iman Abuzeid in action during Covid-19
Incredible Health changes the way hospitals connect with nurses and other medical professionals, to speed up the hiring process. The national average time it takes a hospital to hire a nurse is 82 days. So far, Incredible Health has lowered that number to less than 30 for those using their platform. In this flipped model of the job search, hospitals apply to work with nurses, not the other way around. They also provide career support and advice to those using the platform, and use both an algorithm and human experts to ensure the best job matches.
Currently Incredible Health works with over 150 hospitals. They recently raised $15 dollars in its Series A funding round. According to a study conducted by the company, less than 2% of nurses felt that their hospitals were prepared for the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. During this period of time, hiring has gone up from 1.5 to 2 times on the Incredible Health platform.
Learn more about Incredible Health on the official website.
