It started in 2011 with the dream of being a different kind of MSP. Now, SimpliFi is celebrating 10 years of business and tremendous growth. On this special anniversary, SimpliFi President James Quick, Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer Bambi Gore, MSN, FNP-BC, and Senior Client Relationship Manager Kim Young give us insight into SimpliFi’s beginnings, present endeavors, and future vision.
Gore and Young have each been with the company for almost seven years. Gore provides clinical leadership and serves as a clinical subject matter expert while developing and maintaining partner relationships. Young develops and fosters relationships with health systems across the country. They have both seen the company expand, and it now has 40 employees and counting.
Quick started with SimpliFi in 2017 following the company’s acquisition by Travel Nurse Across America. The acquisition led to a significant additional investment toward technology, people, and resources to further SimpliFi’s mission and allow it to expand to become a national provider.
What makes SimpliFi unique, and what does the company aim to achieve for its clients?
James Quick: At SimpliFi, we are not just about performing the transaction of filling a request for a travel nurse. Our charter is to be a true partner to health systems and to keep our clients’ best interests in mind. We have observed that every health system we speak with has a goal to optimize its labor spend. We help health systems acquire the personnel they need and work with them to optimize their labor spend across several categories, whether that’s their new nurse graduates, contingent labor, or full-time staff.
Bambi Gore: SimpliFi’s point of difference comes down to our relationships, our desire to put the client first, and partnering with them to fulfill their mission and vision.
Kim Young: We are definitely true partners, which is something you don’t get from other managed service providers. What makes us a unique MSP is our ability to sit down in a meeting and genuinely understand our clients’ businesses, their resourcing and budget goals, and our ability to meet their objectives while keeping them informed on industry trends.
How has the company evolved over its 10 years?
James Quick: We started with clients in the Carolinas, where SimpliFi was founded. Since then, we’ve evolved in the scope and size of the health systems we serve. We now serve numerous health systems varied in their care settings – between acute care, primary care, clinics, and ERs – and we serve multi-state health systems.
We have also embraced technology as a core part of our offering. Health systems want to have better, clearer, and easier access to data about their workforce. So, we made significant investments in technology to provide clients with dashboards, reporting, and analytics about their labor spend and utilization. We embraced new cloud-based VMS technology, so health systems can distribute the work and responsibility that goes into hiring contingent labor to managers across the health systems.
In addition, we introduced, piloted, and are expanding our CAP program. Through this program, we help provide qualified preceptors and expand the onboarding capacity of health systems, so they can grow their core nursing staff and reduce their long-term reliance on travelers.
Is there anything SimpliFi will soon be implementing that will help health systems in the future?
James Quick: SimpliFi continues to look for ways to align with health systems to reduce their premium labor spend. We have many tools and partners that we are bringing to market to assist health systems in this unprecedented time of nurse shortage. Every health system is asking, “How can we do more with the nurses we have? How can we recruit and retain additional nurses?” SimpliFi is actively looking at a host of solutions across that spectrum to further assist our clients.
What are some of SimpliFi’s future goals?
James Quick: SimpliFi wants to be markedly different from others in our industry based on the value we provide. Our goal is not as much about being the largest in our industry as it is providing service excellence to a select number of health systems by helping them optimize their workforce.
What has contributed to SimpliFi’s growth?
James Quick: We’ve hired outstanding people from all kinds of industries. We’ve hired workforce strategy insiders who want to impact change, and we’ve hired people from outside the industry. They have been able to bring different perspectives to our team. Every time we do this, we bring new and fresh ideas to our clients.
Another big part of our success is taking a consultative approach with our clients. Some of the challenges clients face are unique to their geography, setting, and history, so you cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach. We have a methodology and customize it to each client to create a solution that works best for them. That’s all done by brilliant people, and it’s been a SimpliFi strength to identify, hire, and maintain these employees.
What do you envision for SimpliFi in the next 10 years?
James Quick: We see technology and transparency coming to the forefront of the industry, and those trends are going to continue. SimpliFi is certainly leaning into those trends. Clients want to see what we are providing as their partner, how well we are doing our job, and how we are charging. We provide technology and people resources to health systems, and we work to be a fantastic provider in both of those categories. In the next 10 years, the dependence on technology and the great consultative team it takes to install it, run it and consult around it is where the industry will head.
Bambi Gore: I’m excited about the potential. The possibilities. All the things we have in the works. We’re talking to so many different clients and it’s exciting to see our teams and our opportunities grow.
SimpliFi is raising the bar in our industry: more ethics, more service, and more ingenuity. If you’d like to begin a conversation with SimpliFi and see what we can do for you, contact us here.