Seven years ago, Jeff Richards was at the peak of a successful career as department director and chief anesthetist at Grady Memorial in Atlanta. While earning his MBA, he wrote a paper about how to solve a problem that plagued him as a hospital administrator: how to find qualified, temporary clinical staff quickly and easily.
Richards envisioned a healthcare app that would allow hospitals to search for clinicians with the necessary expertise and help clinicians more easily find shifts and positions. At the same time, a classmate was working on something similar and the two joined forces to form SnapMedTech Inc. DBA SnapCare.
SnapCare is a tech-enabled workforce marketplace in the healthcare industry with a mission to serve the full continuum of care and give healthcare facilities complete visibility into the right mix of talent. Its workforce solutions give control back to healthcare facilities, take the excess costs out of staffing, inspire a new level of trust and transparency and enable its clients to focus on what matters most: providing quality care for patients.
Under Richards’ leadership, the company navigated the COVID-19 pandemic to meet the demand for nurses and grew the company’s revenue by 40,000% in two years, enough to earn second place on the 2022 Inc. 5000 List of Fastest Growing Companies. Since the slowdown with the end of the pandemic, Richards has reimagined the company to become more than a staffing service for nurses, but more of a full healthcare marketplace platform.
“Every worker can identify problems within their industry or profession but very few take the initiative to do something about it, particularly if it requires abandoning a stable and prestigious career like Richards did,” said his colleagues. “While he was a novice entrepreneur, Richards has found that the unflappability he acquired as a trauma anesthetist and the focus and stamina from triathlon training serve him well in the fast-moving and competitive world of healthcare technology.”
With Richards at the helm, the company relaunched as SnapCare in October 2023, earned revenues greater than $1 billion in 2021 and 2022 and received the No. 1 Pacesetter Award from the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
If Richards could give his younger self advice, it would be that the greatest opportunity in life is to bet on yourself. “If you believe in your idea and have the courage and will to take the risk, don’t wait to make that bet,” he said. “I was 47 years old when I co-launched this company and if anything, I would tell my younger self to dispel those feelings of self-doubt and take the risk earlier.”
