CHG Healthcare Helps Hospitals Tackle Staff Shortages as Demand for Doctors and Nurses Soars

Healthcare staffing solutions leader CHG delivers the people and tools hospitals need to meet critical staffing requirements.

America’s healthcare institutions are facing a major staff shortage. By some estimates, demand for healthcare workers will outpace supply by 2025. These shortages have become more pressing during the COVID-19 pandemic, with hospitals overrun and in urgent need of additional doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel to treat and care for patients.

CHG Healthcare provides more than 30% of the temporary medical employees in the United States, making it a key player in the recruitment and hiring of healthcare staff at a crucial time. CHG also helps healthcare facilities fill thousands of permanent positions for physicians, nurses, and other key professionals.

“Healthcare institutions don’t just care for patients. They contribute to the health of our economy and society as a whole. Our role is to help them find the staff and expertise they need to continue doing so for the long term,” says Reed Glauser, director of engineering at CHG.

Today, hospitals rely on digital platforms and talent management software to manage their staffing needs. On a practical level, they increasingly want digital portals where they can easily access staff data, including licenses, credentials, and employment contracts. This helps them manage the complexity of licensing and ensure they find the right people to fill open positions. To deliver on these needs, CHG built an industry-specific suite of digital solutions for healthcare providers, powered by Portworx®.

“Hospitals and healthcare organizations want to handle their recruitment and administration online and empower their staff to interact with patients digitally,” says Glauser. “Technology isn’t just a tool in this environment. It’s a platform that helps us deliver the people and applications hospitals need to continue delivering a high standard of care during the pandemic and beyond.”

Customer Focused, Cloud Native

To build its digital portal, CHG first needed a development environment where Glauser and his team could develop the software and applications behind it. The team migrated most of its technology infrastructure to AWS and adopted Kubernetes to rapidly develop, test, and deploy new applications for the portal. To operate these services in the cloud, CHG needed a storage layer that was as flexible as the other elements of its cloud-native stack.

Glauser and his team did not hesitate in choosing Portworx Essentials initially for the task, which comes complete with the fundamental capabilities required to run databases on Kubernetes. Portworx also met CHG’s needs for replication, data recovery, and availability, while delivering the flexibility to right-size Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) service.

“The shift to digital was a big strategic move for us and Portworx Essentials was a no-brainer to get started. It met all of our technical needs and let us kick-start deployment right away, and then transition to Portworx Enterprise when we were ready,” says Glauser. “Most importantly, it set us up to build the digital services hospitals need to find, engage with, and onboard essential healthcare workers.”

A Ready-to-Use Development Platform

Once on Portworx, CHG was able to optimize and automate its storage management, which included the migration of its Kafka event streaming data from a managed service on the cloud to Kubernetes. “With the persistent storage for Kafka via Portworx, not only did we achieve a smooth migration, we also recouped up to $5,000 per month in data streaming and management costs,” says Glauser. Portworx also sped up CHG’s development cycle, helping Glauser’s team hit delivery targets for new software applications more easily.

Software upgrades are now faster and less painful as well. For instance, Portworx allows CHG to spin up new clusters and migrate to a secure environment at lightning speed, which helps it deploy software packages as quickly as possible whenever new security vulnerabilities are identified.

“We can address issues more quickly than ever thanks to the migration speed and flexibility that Portworx offers straight out of the box,” says Glauser.

Support that Sweetens the Deal

For Micah Coletti, cloud solutions architect at CHG, the support offered by Portworx was the final selling point that put the solution over the edge. “Portworx doesn’t just drop in their solution and leave, they want you to be successful,” he says. “Their engineers always give me additional advice that makes my life easier. It really feels like we’ve gained a true technology partner.”

Summing up the contribution Portworx makes to his business, Glauser is clear. “The platform offers so much more than storage,” he says. “It accelerates and streamlines our cloud development life cycle. With Portworx in place, we can continue to play our part in helping hospitals and medical institutions deliver modern care services across the United States for years to come.