Hosted by Quint Studer with special guest April Hansen

On this episode of The Healthcare Plus Podcast, Quint Studer is joined by special guest April Hansen. April Hansen, MSN, RN is a nurse by background and currently serves as the Group President of Workforce Solutions with Aya Healthcare. No matter the role, April says her primary love and passion sits with improving the human experience and improving healthcare.

April shares that there is an exciting hunger and interest today in rethinking how healthcare is delivered and how leaders are guiding those changes through data insights. One innovative model she’s seeing health systems take great interest in is virtual nursing. Leaders are re-evaluating processes and determining the division of labor that can be handled virtually versus what is required to be done hands-on. With this data, organizations will be able to then perfect and optimize workflows and back them with technology to make a great impact on the patient and caregiver experience.

Quint and April discuss:

• How healthcare leaders should leverage data as they consider innovative care delivery models
• Ways to reduce nurse workloads and improve caregiver satisfaction
• How Aya Healthcare is filling talent gaps to help health systems maintain service line operations and meet the needs of their community

About April Hansen

As Aya Healthcare’s Group President of Workforce Solutions, April Hansen, MSN, RN, is responsible for strategic business development, workforce solutions program operations, recruitment augmentation and clinical services support. Hansen has led her team through exponential growth with new client expansion and several organizational acquisitions, increasing the distribution channels for Aya’s 45000+ clinicians. A strong proponent of lifelong learning, April created the Aya Scholars Program, the industry’s first clinical ladder and professional recognition model for travel nurses, to ensure their continued career growth.

Passionate for improving the clinician experience and solving workforce challenges, Hansen spearheaded an industry-first qualitative market research project examining the lived experiences of core staff, veteran travel nurses and new travel nurses during the pandemic and understanding how that lived experience influences nurses’ career choices. The research, “Mind the Gap: Repairing the US Healthcare Workforce” and its findings have been featured by Healthcare Dive, Axios and SIA and have been presented at numerous hospital and healthcare associations, including Wisconsin Organization of Nurse Leaders where Hansen served as the keynote speaker.

April is a nurse and an entrepreneur. She successfully co-founded a clinical management technology to ease the administrative burden of healthcare student clinical placements in 2012 and achieved a successful exit when the technology was acquired in 2016. In addition, she co-founded a mobile application for nursing engagement and achieved support through a nationally ranked start-up accelerator in partnership with Microsoft in 2017.