Rebecca Love never planned to be a nurse. Or C-suite executive.
Love was accepted into law school, but her mother told her, “We have a lot of strong lawyers in the world. We don't have enough strong nurses.”
So Love agreed to apply to nursing school to please her mother—Northeastern.
“I always hoped to make a positive impact on the world,” says Love, who earned a master's degree in nursing from Northeastern. “I just traditionally didn't think that nursing was the path that could do that. Getting accepted to Northeastern and going into nursing changed my entire life.”
Nursing then launched her into the business world.
As a nurse, Love founded and was the director of HireNurses.com in 2013. The site connects nurses with career opportunities that match their schedule, experience and salary expectations. The company was acquired by Ryalto in March 2018.
About 10 years after earning her nursing degree at Northeastern, Love served as the university's director of nursing innovation and entrepreneurship from 2016 to 2018.
Love is now its chief clinical officer IntelyCarean online service that provides skilled nurses to cover shifts in post-acute healthcare facilities.
She is also an author and passionate advocate for the nursing profession.
“She's amazing,” says Julie Norton, Northeastern's director of academic ceremonies, who worked with Love during her tenure as senior development officer in the Bouve College of Health Sciences. “Outstanding in terms of nurse innovation.”
Norton watched as Love came in with little knowledge of how to run a company and became a national figure.
“I always found that she was willing to talk to a nurse about what was going on or about starting a company,” says Norton. “She's such a shining example of what Northeastern stands for — entrepreneur, entrepreneur, amazing nurse — that she then turned into when she speaks, people listen.”
Prior to working at Northeastern, Love worked in various nursing positions in long-term care facilities and local hospitals. At the time, Love couldn't even imagine that a nurse could become an executive in corporate America.
“Like, anyone who thought it was possible,” Love says. “I only thought about the role of bedside nurses.”
The idea of nurses becoming innovators didn't fully sink in until 2015, when her company HireNurses.com was struggling. A friend suggested she attend a hackathon, an event where a large number of people come together to participate in collaborative computer programming.
While in the room, Love realized she was the only nurse in there and began to form the idea of holding one just for nurses.
So, he connected with the professor Nancy Hanrahan at Northeastern University, who advised her to hold the first hackathon just for nurses.
The event is sold out. He attended every hospital.
The team then created the nation's first nurse innovation program, which launched in 2016. The program enabled nurses to combine their bedside experience with the creation of new businesses and inventions in the workplace.
“And we changed the world in 2017 when Johnson & Johnson discovered the program and decided to flip their 15-year campaign from recognizing and thanking nurses for their service to recognizing nurse innovation as the front line of the future of their campaign ,” says Love.
“It was a big deal,” Love says.
For the first time in three to four decades, nurses began to see themselves differently as a profession that could be more than what others defined it to be, Love says.
They have a bigger voice, but we will need stronger voices in nursing to be able to push this forward.
Rebecca Love, Northeastern graduate and chief clinical officer of IntelyCare;
Nurses are frontline providers and have been innovating since Florence Nightingale, she says Maria van Pelt, clinical instructor at Northeastern School of Nursing who worked with Agapi during her time at the school.
“By being the frontline providers, we are always developing innovative solutions to many of the health care challenges we face in daily practice,” says Pelt. “I think innovative solutions are ways to provide our patients with the best possible care. I think that's a really important role of nursing.”
What stands out most about Agapi is her thought leadership and how she has impacted the global healthcare community, Pelt says.
“It motivates people around the world to implement positive change,” says Pelt. “It empowers them.”
Love would have quit the profession like so many others had she never discovered the power of innovation.
According to the National Institutes of Health, the nursing profession continues to face shortages due to a lack of potential educators, high turnover and an uneven distribution of the workforce.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that more than 275,000 additional nurses will be needed from 2020 to 2030. Nurse burnout continues to be a problem, according to the NIH. The national average for turnover rates is 8.8% to 37%, depending on geographic location and nursing specialty.
Nurses are struggling, Love says.
In the middle of the pandemic, Love received a phone call from David Coppins, the CEO of IntelyCare. Coppins happened to catch Love on a particularly bad day.
Coppins told Love he was growing his board and needed help. In response, Love told him that the problem with staffing agencies and all hospitals and health care systems is that they treat nurses like commodities.
“You treat them like they're an endless supply of a set of 24, a cog in the wheel for a 24/7 need, and they have no value,” says Love. “This is how you treat us and I don't care that we are in the middle of a pandemic. The truth is, you're no different than the hospital systems that employ nurses today.”
Coppins hung up. But 24 hours later, she called Love back, asking for a different conversation, admitting that Love was right.
He asked Love to step in as the voice of nurses within the organization and make sure the company is building solutions to sustain the nursing profession and invest in them to be better.
Love decided to join the company to help long-term care facilities succeed.
In nursing, there's a mentality that if a nurse makes a mistake, they're fired, Love says. But often, these mistakes happen because nurses are not trained in these settings. IntelyCare is working to solve this problem by providing certification, clinical quality and training to potential remote workers.
Love says the method allows the company to train and retain nurses instead of firing them.
In Northeastern's innovation program, Love learned that she could redefine what a profession looks like and that nurses can reach different career levels than in the past.
“If you look at nurses my grandmother's age, and then you look at nurses my mother's age, and then you look at nurses our age, there's been a huge shift in where those nurses can sit,” Love says. “They do have a bigger voice, but we're going to need stronger voices in nursing to be able to push this forward.”
Beth Treffeisen is a reporter for Northeastern Global News. Email her at b.treffeisen@northeastern.edu. Follow her on Twitter @beth_treffeisen.
