In this episode entrepreneur Cory Kleinschmidt, founder and CEO of Locumpedia, tells the DocWorking audience all about what Locumpedia is, what their mission is, and how it may be very useful to you. Locumpedia is a new locum tenens industry platform that helps physicians, staffing firms, and healthcare facilities make smart decisions with free news, resources, and tools.
“We’re all stressed out from the pandemic, but a lot of the trends with healthcare workers began well before and of course now it’s gotten to the point where something has to give and it’s just a great way for doctors to have a flexible working model.” – Cory Kleinschmidt
Are you interested in working locums, or is this the first time you’ve heard of locum tenens? In this episode, Jen Barna MD, DocWorking founder and CEO, comes to us from Las Vegas, Nevada at the NAPR Conference with entrepreneur Cory Kleinschmidt, founder and CEO of Locumpedia, to tell the DocWorking audience all about what Locumpedia is, what their mission is, and how it may be very useful to you. Locumpedia is a new locum tenens industry platform that helps physicians, staffing firms, and healthcare facilities make smart decisions with free news, resources, and tools. If you are looking for job flexibility and work-life balance, or even a side gig, locums may be the answer for you. To learn more about locums, check out Locumpedia.com.
Locum tenens definition- one filling an office for a time or temporarily taking the place of another —used especially of a doctor or clergyman
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Please enjoy the full transcript below
Cory: We’re all stressed out from the pandemic, but a lot of the trends with healthcare workers began well before and of course now it’s gotten to the point where something’s got to give and it’s just a great way for doctors to have a flexible working model.
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Jen: Welcome to DocWorking: The Whole Physician Podcast. I’m Dr. Jen Barna and today, I’m recording from Las Vegas at the NAPR conference. I’m here today with Cory Kleinschmidt of Locumpedia and I’m excited to hear about his new company, because I think that for our listeners, it’ll be something that you’re really interested in knowing about, and also, I’m really interested in hearing, Cory, about the whole process that you’ve been through in starting up this company, and what you’ve gone through from July 2020 roughly when you guys started to where you are today, and what you see going forward.
Cory: Sure. Thanks, Jen for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to tell our story. Yeah, we started Locumpedia during the pandemic, not the most recommended time to start a company, but I’ve heard from people that it’s not a bad time, because you get an opportunity to really build organically while the world is trying to do its thing. Of course, one of the things that we do with Locumpedia is, we cover news that’s relevant to the stakeholders in the locum tenens industry, anything from agencies to direct employers, to providers of course. Launching during the pandemic gave us an endless source of news to cover. That’s one of the things that we focus a lot on is how COVID impacted the locum tenens industry and the experience for employers and for providers. It worked out in some strange way, but definitely wouldn’t recommend it necessarily.
We started with the idea of building what is now becoming the first locum tenens industry platform. The industry as a whole is very fragmented. You don’t really have any central news source, there are a whole bunch of different job boards, there’s really no complete source of information related to locum tenens staffing agencies. We thought that was an opportunity to pull all these things together and integrate them into what we are considering initially a community or the industry watercooler. It has grown from the news division to this directory that I mentioned. So, any provider who is thinking about working with an agency, they can check out the agency’s profile on our site locumpedia.com, find out what they specialize and in terms of their top specialties and the types of providers they staff.
Every agency says, not everyone, but a lot of them say that they staff every specialty, but if you look at how many jobs they have, you can clearly see that they inevitably have a certain subset of specialties that they consider their top specialties. That can be beneficial for providers who want to see like, “Well I’m an OB, so which agencies really actually have a lot of OB jobs, who are experts in that specialty, you would think that that’s going to be a better working experience with an agency and they have better clients, better assignments, and so on.”
Another aspect of our mission is to unify all of the locum tenens jobs online into this centralized resource. We started with a locum tenens job search engine that we launched last year. You just type in a keyword search, Hospitalist Texas, and you can find all the agencies that have jobs, put it on their website for the job details, and then go to their website and directly apply. This week in conjunction with NALTO and NAPR conference, we launched our own locum tenens job board. It’s totally free. There is another locum tenens job board that is free that coincidentally, myself and my team created 20 years ago. So, I’ve been down this road before and learned a few things in the process. Of course, at the time, I thought locum tenens were called local tenens. I had no idea what it meant.
Jen: Yeah, so, actually tell us about that for someone who might be listening who doesn’t know. Our audience is mostly physicians and all the way from premed medical students on up to practicing physicians and retired physicians, so for someone who doesn’t know what locum tenens are.
Cory: Sure, locum tenens, as Wikipedia will tell you, it means “to hold the place of.” I’m not sure where the term came from, but it’s a pretty neat term and better than saying temporary doctors. But essentially, that’s what it is, doctors who are anywhere from full-time docs who are moonlighting or working while on vacation in Florida or in Alaska, and they work on a temporary basis. Some of them are even full-time temporary doctors. They’re 1099 subcontractors. So, they’re basically independent workers.
Jen: As a physician, it’s actually a great option potentially to add income. You can do it as a side gig during your vacation if you want to travel and work. You can also, of course, make a whole career of it and a lot of people do it, because they can control how much time they work, and where they work, and they can work in small segments, and then have greater amounts of time off in between. A lot of physicians work locums at some point during their career and a lot of people work locums when they so-called retire, they don’t really retire, they just cut back.
Cory: They just I think keep giving back, we’ve heard a lot of doctors who want to do that, too. They don’t want to work full time, but they do want to still contribute and deliver healthcare and make a difference. The locum tenens working model, it really dovetails with a lot of trends actually, preceded a lot of trends that you see today in terms of the so-called gig economy, professionals working independently for being their own bosses and doing their own thing, also work-life balance.
That’s why I really enjoyed hearing about your concept with DocWorking, because work-life balance is mental health and we’re all stressed out from the pandemic, but a lot of the trends with healthcare workers began well before and of course now it’s gotten to the point where something’s got to give and it’s just a great way for doctors to have a flexible working model, especially if it’s a young mom, she can do her work thing and live on her own terms, just the flexibility and the ability to have work-life balance is phenomenal. There’s a lot of resources online, too, that you can find that will help you understand how you can work the locum tenens model, and also manage your finances, and work toward retirement. That’s another trend, early retirement, that everybody’s interested in.
Jen: Absolutely.
Cory: It’s the locum tenens work model that is really at the intersection of these trends. Again, I think it really preceded them.
Jen: Yeah, absolutely. Financial independence with the option to retire early, as we say at DocWorking. So, what’s different about Locumpedia compared to a locum job board?
Cory: Well, technically, we’re not really a job board. That’s one big difference. We are considering ourselves the first locum tenens industry platform. That’s a key difference from the get go. Other job boards really are just job boards. What we are building and have built is really the beginnings of a true locum tenens community. As I mentioned earlier, we are the only industry news source right now outside of the National Association of Locum Tenens Organizations, which also publishes some news, but everything right now is totally free. We’re trying to build up an audience and then figure out how to monetize later. But first, we want to give back to the industry and show that we are building this for the benefit of the entire industry. These things that we’re offering, we think should be freely available to all stakeholders in the industry. The short answer is, we’re not just a job board.
You won’t find any other job board that’s covering the industry like we are. One of the things that we just launched in conjunction with our job board is the ability for providers to post reviews of agencies they worked with before. You see how we’re angling to be the Google of the locum tenens industry. Multiple products integrated into the same platform. You don’t have to register to join or to read the news or subscribe to a newsletter. You would have to register to post reviews of agencies and of course, search jobs, things like that. That’s how we’re different. We will grow the job board. We just launched, so we’re in the process of getting job feeds from some of the top agencies. We expect that we will probably have 10,000 jobs or so on the board within the next one to two months. So, that’s really the key difference.
We’re building something that doesn’t exist right now and we really want it to be the place where providers can really go to get a pulse of the industry, because it’s so fragmented that there’s bits and pieces of it here and there, but there’s really nothing that pulls it all together. So, we saw that as an opportunity to build something cool, something that is meaningful and helpful to the industry, and build a business around it.
Jen: Well, terrific. I’m excited to see where you go with it. I think it’s going to be a really wonderful resource for healthcare workers and physicians, who are working locums and interested in building financial independence, improving work-life balance, all of the things that factor in when we decide whether to add some locums work onto our schedule, or whether to make it a side gig or whether to make it a full-time gig. I think having one place to go to see all this information will be terrific.
Cory: We published what we call a “No BS guide” to locum tenens. I think you know what BS stands for, but there is a lot of BS in the industry. One of the things that we tried to do with our editorial, or direction or voice is to really cut through the chatter, and to get down to brass tacks, to be real, to talk authentically, because we’re not owned by an agency like the other large locum tenens job board. We speak freely. We are certainly not trying to offend anyone, but we’re trying to, I guess, translate a lot of the jargon that comes out of the agency world.
I have a lot of good friends in the agency world, but they are private businesses and they have their own incentives. Our No BS Guide, it’s for providers. It’s a complete handbook for providers to understand the whole locum tenens model, and how you can get into it, and then make the most of it.
Jen: Excellent. So, can people find that on your site, locumpedia.com?
Cory: locumpedia.com.
Jen: L-O-C-U-M-P-E-D-I-A dot com. This is Cory Kleinschmidt joining me from Las Vegas, Nevada without masks on. First time, I’ve not had a mask on in a couple years here and it’s also the first time we’ve recorded a podcast that was not two people in two different locations on a Zoom recording.
Cory: Well, I’m very honored to be the first.
Jen: Fantastic. I hope it is the first of many. So, great to be here with Cory, and I hope you guys will check out Locumpedia, and find it to be of great value.
Cory: Thanks, Jen.
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Amanda: I’m Amanda Taran, producer of DocWorking: The Whole Physician Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Please don’t forget to like and subscribe and head over to docworking.com to see all we have to offer.
