By Colton Lord

Jessica Sylvester is the Founder and CEO of the company Humla Health. Humla is a tech platform that streamlines staffing and scheduling, connecting healthcare facilities with credentialed W-2 nurses. By filling this gap, Jessica has made it possible, through Humla, to enable W-2 nurses to work independently within a unified system. Jessica understands the importance of serving both sides of the coin by giving power and agency to nurses while also respecting and working harmoniously with healthcare systems.

Filling the Gaps

“Hope is not a strategy,” Jessica points out in our conversation.

Jessica dives deep into the pain that ignited her flame to innovate healthcare and the role a nurse plays in this industry. Serving as a director of emergency services at a large trauma center in her home state of Minnesota during the COVID-19 pandemic, she had had enough of witnessing agencies and HR departments artificially inflate rates and move without urgency as staffing crises debilitated nurses across the U.S.

Imagine a dating app, but for nurses to match with facilities to work.

Drawing inspiration from tech systems that already existed, such as Uber, Rover, and dating apps, the answer became clear. Through Humla Health, credentialed nurses can create a profile, and once that is done, Humla matches nurses like a dating website and allows them to self-schedule similar to how users book stays on VRBO.

Genius, right?

Travel Nursing vs. Humla Health

In a typical travel nurse contract agreement, the nurse is required to find a recruiter they can trust, that recruiter finds facilities that the company is contracted with, they work on a contract, and then the nurse typically signs a 13-week contract.

Humla Health is essentially removing the middleman—the recruiter and the travel nurse company—to give more agency back to nurses. The nurse is able to pull shifts directly from their profile and self-schedule. There is no recruiter. There is no travel nurse agency. The agreement is between the nurse and the chosen healthcare facility.