Some companies are born from an idea. MedicalMatch was born from experience. After nearly two decades in healthcare, including years spent working directly with patients and managing rapidly growing care teams, Ali Phillips had seen the healthcare workforce problem from multiple angles. She also saw an opportunity: instead of constantly searching for more workers, what if healthcare organizations could better understand and deploy the workforce they already had?
For this edition of Deal Flow Spotlight, we sat down with Ali for a conversation around her journey from healthcare professional to founder, the workforce challenges that inspired MedicalMatch, how the company is rethinking healthcare staffing, and where she sees the opportunity ahead.
Q. Okay, Ali, to start us off, please introduce us to who you are and the company you're building.
I’m Ali Phillips, and I’m a registered nurse. I’ve been in healthcare for about two decades. I started my nursing career in a Trauma One ER, then moved into home health and hospice. I also worked in South America as a third-world nurse before returning to the U.S. and helping home health and hospice agencies prepare for accreditation.
I was later recruited by UnitedHealthcare to grow its palliative care team in Las Vegas. We took the team from about 40 patients to roughly 2,800 in eight months. That kind of growth obviously created a huge workforce need, and I saw a lot of hiccups in how that workforce was being managed.
That’s where MedicalMatch came from. We initially built an open, double-sided marketplace where healthcare professionals could pick up shifts with healthcare organizations. We designed it to be professional and industry-agnostic so that we could support any area of healthcare, and organizations set their own base rates.
As we worked with employers, we saw an even bigger need: helping them deploy their internal teams more effectively. So, this summer, we launched our internal pool solution. It overlays a healthcare system’s education, scheduling, and HR software and turns its internal team into a networked “Flow Pool.”
When a gap opens in the schedule, qualified clinicians who match the education and skill requirements for that department or location can be notified and pick up the opportunity outside their full-time role. At a high level, we are a workforce operating system with an embedded marketplace, helping healthcare organizations reduce overtime and contingent staffing costs.
Q. Were there any personal experiences that ultimately drove you to start MedicalMatch?
Absolutely. When I was working at the bedside as a nurse, one of my biggest frustrations was how difficult scheduling could be.
Before I had kids, I could work a lot of overtime and was happy to do it. But once I had children, the situation changed. Units were always short-staffed, and I would get a call saying, “We’re short on Friday. I need you to come in.” But maybe my husband was working Friday, my young son was at home, and I didn’t have family nearby. I could come in Sunday, but they didn’t need me on Sunday.
That creates a kind of moral injury. You don’t want to let your teammates down, but you also need to show up for your family. The problem was that there was no way for one scheduler to know all of those individual circumstances across an entire workforce.
Workforce dynamics are shifting whether we like it or not. The younger generation increasingly wants to protect their time and work when and where they want, rather than being told when they need to be there. Those bedside experiences are a big part of why I created MedicalMatch the way I did.
Q. What's something you've learned that you wish you'd known when you started building the company?
I wish we had started with the internal market, or internal pool solution, first.
Q. And why is that so? What challenges have you faced in this regard?
There is a lot of distrust between healthcare personnel and healthcare organizations, as well as between healthcare organizations and traditional staffing agencies.
During COVID, hospitals desperately needed clinical teams, and staffing agencies could charge extremely high premiums for access to their networks. That wasn’t financially sustainable, and it further widened the gap between healthcare organizations and clinicians.
Now, you can go into a boardroom and hear leaders asking how they can get staffing agencies out of their buildings. But removing staffing agencies doesn’t solve the workforce problem. I believe the conversation will increasingly become about how healthcare organizations better manage the ratio of W-2 staff to 1099 staff, especially as workforce costs continue to rise.
Q. What milestones have made you feel like you're moving in the right direction?
The internal pool solution has generated strong interest. Banner Health has asked for a proposal for a 4-month paid pilot, and we’ve recently sent it over. University of Utah Health has expressed interest in the internal pool solution alongside the marketplace for their workforce planning in 2027. Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital has also expressed interest.
Lifepoint, which operates in 40 states, is also eager to do a pilot with us, along with several regional hospitals.
I think what it comes down to is trust. We want our healthcare partners to know we’re here for the long game—to help with both their internal and external workforce, without competing with them for local talent.
Q. What do you believe MedicalMatch could become, and why should investors be excited?
Traditional staffing agencies and marketplace platforms are often hyper-focused on just a few professions or specific geographic areas. We designed MedicalMatch to support the entire workforce lifecycle.
We partner with schools and education systems, and our onboarding structure allows us to match clinicians based on their skills, education, department needs, and even facility-specific requirements.
We can support any area of healthcare, whether clinical or non-clinical. Think about a national healthcare system like Kaiser Permanente: it has hospitals, clinics, surgical centers, home health and hospice agencies, and private-duty services. MedicalMatch can serve the different environments across that ecosystem.
Q. Beyond capital, what can the right investor community bring to MedicalMatch?
Healthcare is all about who you know and who you can introduce us to. Alongside capital, warm introductions are incredibly valuable to us.
Any investor with a connection in healthcare who can help us get introductions to healthcare organizations can make a tremendous difference.
We’ve already seen that through the Keiretsu Forum network. We’ve had members connected to enterprise healthcare opportunities express interest in MedicalMatch. Arthur Benjamin has also added significant value through his experience in workforce, education, and talent acquisition, even though he doesn’t come directly from healthcare. He will likely be joining our board very shortly!
Q. What keeps you motivated when things get tough?
Honestly, it’s our team and the mission of MedicalMatch.
What I love about this company is that it’s so much bigger than just me or our team because of the amount of good it can do. Workforce challenges directly affect the communities we serve.
My son broke his arm on the first day of kindergarten, and when I took him to the emergency department, we waited four hours before a doctor was able to see him. He was five years old and had a broken arm.
Our communities suffer when workforce challenges are at the forefront of a healthcare system’s priorities and obligations. What gets me out of bed is the ability to help stabilize that supply and demand.