Black female entrepreneuer co-founds $1 billion company

we are very excited now here during black business month to welcome our next guest during a nursing staffing crisis dr iman abuzad founded a tech platform connecting short staffed hospitals with qualified nurses she co-founded incredible health and she is doing incredible things for the healthcare industry all the while becoming one of a handful of black women running a company worth over one billion dollars dr abu zaid is joining us here right now in our times square studios welcome congratulations on all of your success and i know you were born into a family of health care workers i know you got your uh medical degree you skipped residency and you became an entrepreneur instead how did that all come about yeah so i'm an md by background decided not to do residency i went into hospital in operation hospital operations and strategy i and in management consulting at mckinsey and booz allen then did my mba at wharton then at that point moved to the san francisco bay area where i really got into startups i was a product manager at an early stage healthcare technology company before leaving there to join my co-founder ron portlock who's a mit software engineer to start incredible health okay you have to help us i have to go back to this did you know going into med school that you weren't going to ultimately pursue that career or did you make up your mind when that just sounds incredible i went through all this and now so like one-on-one patient care is great and it's a great great career great profession but i really wanted to have an impact on a larger scale for me i have many family members and friends that are doctors and surgeons and they are often complaining about understaffing and then at the same time my co-founder rome has many family members that are nurses and they're saying i'm you know i apply to 10 places i don't even hear back even though i'm experienced and i'm qualified so we figured there has to be a better way i mean healthcare is the biggest labor sector in the country uh it has the biggest shortages uh but the technology the tools the processes not much has changed in the last 20 years and so we figured there has to be a better way so what is the better way what did you figure out how are you doing it so at incredible health there's a few unique things that we do first the employers on our platform apply to the talents instead of the other way around so if you're a nurse you create a profile you sit back and relax you get interview requests and you get to choose which interviews to accept or decline and then we've also automated the screening of the talent we checked their credentials their preferences and we built custom matching technology too that that makes it a much more personalized and automated experience for both sides and so ultimately what that means is that hospitals and health systems are able to hire permanent nurses using our platform in 14 days instead of it taking the national average of 82 days you talk about this sector the healthcare sector um give and we were just talking before we came on here but give us an idea of what you're seeing just how bad right now our nursing shortage is and how much you anticipate it's going to get worse before it gets better correct we're on track to be 1 million nurses short by the end of 2023. uh you know the nursing short is not new it's been around since before the pandemic and that's because our our demand on the health care system continues to increase as our population ages but the supply of workers has not kept up with that demand now anybody in your position entrepreneur knows it's tough it's very difficult to raise money what extra i'm not sure that was hard for you but what difficulty extra difficulty did you ever feel came because yes you're a woman and you're a woman of color so look it's true there is bias in the system i think uh black female founders receive less than one percent of venture capital uh so the statistics are pretty pretty bad but the truth is that you really have to suppress or ignore uh all of that bias because frankly my counterparts are not spending any mental energy thinking about that and you just really just have to pursue your mission and vision and be extremely assertive and uh communicate you know what the legendary company or ambition that you want to build speaking of ambition where do you want to take this uh you've already reached pretty significant milestones but what do you want to do next so on a personal note i think healthcare workers are some of the most overworked and under-appreciated workers in this country and so we want to do whatever we can to give them a delightful experience so we're building this category defining company we are the market leaders in healthcare labor and the goal is to continue you know transforming this industry any chance you're going to go back and do your residency probably not my dad would probably like me to do okay got to iman thank you so much for joining us we appreciate it it's nice to have you here in studio thank you so much for having me well hey there gma fans robin roberts here thanks for checking out our youtube channel lots of great stuff here so go on click the subscribe button right over right over here to get more of awesome videos and content from gma every day anytime we thank you for watching and we'll see you in the morning on gma

Channel: Good Morning America

Views: 37,379

Keywords: Black, abuzeid, black, dr., entrepreneur, female, health, healthcare, iman, incredible, p_cmsid=2494279, p_vid=news-88895141, workers

Id: 7m1tvsZfwo0

Length: 4min 31sec (271 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022