🔒CT startup aims to help alleviate nursing home staffing shortages

While hospital nurse shortages are forcing large healthcare institutions to reevaluate how they recruit and retain talent, one Connecticut entrepreneur is trying to help resolve staffing issues within an adjacent industry: nursing homes.

StaffOnTap, founded earlier this year by 27-year-old Simsbury resident Kayla Foley, is an online digital marketplace connecting understaffed nursing homes with nurses looking for more work. The Connecticut-based business is looking to grow its team, add a training program and expand into other states. It’s currently in the middle of a $700,000 pre-seed fundraising round.

Foley said she wants to make a positive impact in the senior-care industry at a time when staffing shortages plague numerous healthcare organizations.

“We empower these nurses who may have left senior care during the pandemic, or may have a job in a hospital and want a side gig,” Foley said. “They get to set their own rates, schedules, locations, and we just connect them digitally to nursing homes.”

Senior-care background

Foley has roots in nursing homes and the senior-care industry. Her grandmother founded a nursing home in Glastonbury about 60 years ago and her father, Brian Foley, helped run the business. When he was older he expanded the nursing home company, Apple Rehab, to more than 20 locations throughout Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Apple Rehab is among the nursing homes that uses StaffOnTap’s services, Kayla Foley said.

“I kind of grew up working in the family business,” she said.

(Brian Foley is a well-known nursing home owner. He and his wife, entrepreneur and former GOP Congressional candidate Lisa-Wilson Foley, pleaded guilty in 2014 to violating federal campaign finance laws in a scandal that involved their nursing home business and ensnarled and sent to prison for a second time, former Gov. John Rowland.)

Kayla Foley went to Boston College for undergrad and began managing one of her family’s nursing homes after getting her nursing home administrator’s license. After working on the business development side of the industry, she realized that’s where her focus should be.

“I learned I liked the strategy side of how to improve the quality of care. But while I did that, I realized I couldn’t push the needle on the quality of care because of the staffing crisis,” Foley said. “I was trying to implement specialized dementia training programs and cardiopulmonary specialized programs but we just couldn’t find the nurse that was going to be working the next day, and so that’s where all of our resources were going.”

Foley went back to school and earned a master’s degree in public health from Yale University, where she also learned she wanted to start a business.

“I spent the rest of my time there coming up with a million different business plans to improve the quality of care and nursing homes,” Foley said.

After Yale, Foley pursed an MBA at Cornell University where she said she learned what it takes to be an entrepreneur. It was at Cornell where she founded StaffOnTap by raising $125,000 through pitch competitions and loans. The company officially launched in April 2022.

Growth capital

Here’s how StaffOnTap works: A nursing home experiencing a worker shortage — whether it’s someone calling out sick, or a general lack of full-time staff — can go to the company’s website and find qualified nurses in their area willing to work a shift. They book the nurse directly on the site.

Nurses onboarded by StaffOnTap usually take between two to three shifts per week. Nurses set their own rates based on their schedules and expertise.

“It’s usually these nurses who have full-time jobs at other locations and want a side gig for last-minute shifts where they can make more money than at their full-time job,” Foley said. “Additionally, it’s for nurses who left the industry during COVID and don’t want to come back full time but are interested in working when they want and where they want.”

For each booking, the company takes a $30 transaction fee from the nursing home per eight-hour shift. Nurses aren’t charged anything to be on StaffOnTap.

In the first three months of launching, StaffOnTap had gross revenues exceeding $95,000. Now about six months into the operation, Foley said the company has $360,000 in gross revenue. And much of that was done between June and September.

“June is when we really hit our stride and went from two nurses to 20 nurses in a matter of two weeks, and it just kept going from there,” Foley said.

She said StaffOnTap has contracts with about 15% of nursing homes in Connecticut and 50 nurses have been fully onboarded. The company has another 500 nurse applications waiting to be moved through the system.

“Our demand is kind of exceeding our team’s time capacity right now,” Foley said.

The company currently has three full-time employees as part of the management team and several part-time or contracted workers. Growing the roster is a natural next step, Foley said. Scaling the business to expand into other states is another goal.

“Luckily, it’s a very scalable business since our nurses self-manage — they’re true independent contractors,” Foley said. “We’re looking at that in about the next four months to go across state lines.”

Foley said StaffOnTap’s next focus is also on creating a training program for nurses with experience in hospitals and other care centers but not necessarily nursing homes. The program would be mostly virtual but also give nurses an in-person chance to see what a typical nursing home shift looks like.

To achieve those and other growth goals, StaffOnTap is aiming to raise $700,000 in pre-seed money.

“About 80% of the nurses that are fully onboarded with us were word-of-mouth referrals,” Foley said. “So, we’re definitely getting our name out there, which is a really exciting milestone.”