Software company symplr picked up AMN Healthcare's Smart Square AI-based scheduling software in a $75 million deal as it builds out its healthcare workforce capabilities.
This strategic acquisition strengthens symplr’s position in healthcare workforce and operations management with broad solutions for nurse and staff scheduling and timekeeping. The total purchase price was $75 million, with $65 million paid at closing and a $10 million note due at the end of 2026, AMN Healthcare said in a press release.
The deal adds predictive scheduling and real-time staffing capabilities to symplr’s workforce suite as healthcare providers are consolidating technology and doubling down on automation to manage rising labor complexity, the company said.
In addition to the acquisition, symplr and AMN entered into a commercial partnership to enable customers to have access to symplr’s operational technology and AMN’s healthcare workforce solutions.
Symplr currently offers management systems for all roles in healthcare, including provider credentialing, provider directory, physician scheduling, timekeeping, clinical communication, and quality management solutions. The deal combines two Best in KLAS solutions—symplr’s time and attendance technology and AMN's nurse scheduling tool.
Smart Square enhances symplr’s broader suite of workforce and talent solutions by offering a cloud-based SaaS workforce management solution with AI-driven scheduling capabilities such as predictive analytics, real-time staffing adjustments, open-shift management and nurse competency integration, the company said.
Following the deal, AMN will now focus on developing its Workwise platform that includes workforce advisory, planning AI, staffing and analytics solutions.
"When we found the opportunity to do the Smart Square acquisition, we realized it would actually accelerate our own development by a couple years, and frankly, they had a lot of capabilities that were in our roadmap," BJ Schaknowski, CEO of symplr, told Fierce Healthcare. "It was an obvious acceleration of core features and functionality that customers had. They've already done a lot of work in and around embedding AI into some of the predictive workflows and analytics and they've got some great feature functionality that we weren't even contemplating."
He added, "It really rounds out this idea of being able to fully schedule a nurse workforce."
“Healthcare organizations are navigating unprecedented workforce complexity. This deal advances our focus on workforce planning, analytics and AI with our WorkWise platform, while seamlessly integrating with our customers’ scheduling and operational tools through strategic technology partnerships like symplr,” said Cary Grace, president and CEO at AMN Healthcare in a statement.
Healthcare organizations continue to face labor shortages, particularly in nursing. "What better AI-driven staff and scheduling does is it really enables you to get the greatest productivity out of your nurse or other population, which only improves the outcome for your facilities. That could be 'right nurse, right shift, right facility,' that could be thinking about pooling with nurses from different facilities working across facilities and that could be looking at how to bring costs down and really understanding what shifts you actually need to compensate more for, what shifts you don't to get them filled, understanding how much of what skill set or what competency you need based on historical demand and what future demand is going to look like," Schaknowski said. "It's a smarter way to manage the productivity and efficiency of the workforce you already have, and really schedule end-to-end more intelligently."
More intelligent and efficient scheduling also benefits nurses, he noted.
"This gives them a lot more flexibility in picking some of those shifts that may be right for them. If you have AI-driven and more intelligent-driven staffing scheduling, you also get better nurse engagement, which leads to better patient outcomes and less attrition of your nurse workforce. We do think that this is a better experience for the nurses," he said.
Symplr unveiled its Operations Platform, or SOP, at ViVE digital health conference in February.
The technology is built on Amazon Web Services' cloud infrastructure and is designed to make it easier for CIOs and other healthcare tech leaders to align disparate systems into one. It also allows teams to build more standardized processes that they can more readily measure over time.
The company's operations platform combines 28 interconnected applications in one place "to reduce operational complexity, unlock value, and transition from multi-vendor environments," according to company executives.
"Our platform has brought together 28 previously disparate point product applications across what is considered the healthcare operations landscape. Think credentialing or provider data management, think scheduling and staffing, time and attendance of the entire clinical workforce as well as the administrative workforce. Think learning and talent solutions for that workforce and communications amongst them, contract management, spend management, vendor access management, compliance, quality, safety, all of the pieces that don't directly typically touch the patients but yet are required to do to actually run an acute care facility. That's what we do, and we now have stitched them together on AWS," Schaknowski said during an interview back in February.
Symplr invested over $50 million over the last three years in building out modern cloud-based applications and interoperability capabilities to unify healthcare operations, he noted.
Nine out of 10 U.S. hospitals run at least one symplr application, and the company works with more than 400 health plans as well as 6,000 post-acute and long-term care senior living facilities, according to the company.