Vivian Health’s Parth Bhakta says health staffing woes likely to continue in 2024

Despite all of the talk surrounding the need for more nursing and direct care workers in 2023, industry observers don’t expect healthcare workforce shortages to go away in 2024.

Parth Bhakta, founder and CEO of healthcare talent marketplace Vivian Health, told Healthcare Brew that although peak pandemic crisis pay rates have started to drop this year, the demand for hospital workers, particularly nurses, continued to outstrip demand—and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

“There’s a bit of a waiting game [with] a lot of these winter contract orders: People are trying to fill them at lower pay rates, but [workers] are still holding out and they’re not filling the jobs that they need,” Bhakta said. “I do believe that going into 2024 you’re going to see the continued demand on the healthcare workforce, where there’s just not enough healthcare workers and there’s a ton of open positions that remain to be filled.”

Vivian reported a slight drop (-0.2%) in the nationwide average travel nursing salary from October to November of this year. Compared to last year, however, the average weekly pay is down almost 11%, or $2,714 in November 2022 versus $2,417 in November 2023.

But pay rates for permanent healthcare workers—including licensed practical and vocational nurses, registered nurses, allied health professionals, and certified nursing assistants—rose between November 2022 and October 2023, suggesting that “healthcare systems are now redoubling efforts to fill staff roles and rely less on travel nurses,” Vivian reported.

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projected that the healthcare and social assistance sector will grow the fastest of any industry in the next decade, adding 2.1 million jobs or about 45% of all new employment by 2032, as the population ages and chronic conditions become more prevalent.

Home health and personal care aides are expected to see the largest increase of any occupation, and BLS has projected a gain of nearly 805,000 new jobs in those specialties by 2032. BLS further estimated that demand for nurse practitioners could grow by 44.5% during that period, while demand for physician assistants may increase by 26.5%.

BLS reported nearly 1.5 million open healthcare and social assistance sector jobs as of October.

Despite the projected openings, new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software, could help mitigate staffing challenges—or at least help hospitals hire contract nurses more quickly, Bhakta said.

“We believe AI can play a pretty large role in the job search and really in the job-matching process. We’ve actually seen that if someone’s able to respond to a candidate within six minutes of applying to a job, they’re twice as likely to get placed in that job opportunity,” he said.

With almost 60% of Vivian’s 1+ million users applying for jobs after normal business hours when recruiters don’t work, Bhakta offered that AI could “step in and answer the questions to help get the candidate to the next step.”

In early 2024, Vivian plans to release an AI-powered digital assistant called VivianAI Copilot to help recruiters match candidates to jobs within 24 hours versus the 4–5 days it usually takes a human recruiter, Bhakta said.

“If we can streamline that process using AI, we believe we can enable healthcare workers to get in jobs much more quickly, and more importantly, getting them the jobs that really fit their needs and fit the type of role that allows them to continue to stay in the healthcare workforce rather than [getting] burnt out and leaving,” he said.

Update 12/19/23: This story has been updated to reflect that Vivian Health places jobseekers into both contract and permanent positions.