Photo by Andrea Sarcos

Alejandro Moreno (MBA 1988) didn’t know much about travel nursing when he met a fellow entrepreneur by chance at a child’s birthday party in 2003. The man was considering starting a new business providing short-term staffing assistance to hospitals around the country. Moreno, who had purchased his first company while still at HBS and recently sold his investments, was intrigued by the opportunity. Travel nursing got its start in the 1980s, and its biggest player had recently gone public, revealing a wealth of data about the sector. “To me, it looked like an industry that was going to grow and prosper,” Moreno recalls.

But when he cofounded Nightingale Nurses 19 years ago, Moreno could have never predicted the ongoing pandemic, which has put incredible strain on the nursing sector. “If you are an IT programmer, people’s lives don't depend on your work. It’s very different for nurses,” notes. “Our nurses have had a humongous impact of maintaining hospitals and keeping other health care facilities operating. They’re working very long hours. They’re away from home. It’s just a tough place for them to be, which is why they’re burning out.”

Still, Moreno sees brighter days ahead. The pandemic has put a spotlight on the importance of nurses in the health care sector, and the high demand for their skills has given nurses greater bargaining power to negotiate higher salaries and better working conditions. “I think the industry has been permanently transformed,” says Moreno, CEO and currently sole owner of Nightingale Nurses, which employs 1,000 traveling nurses. “If travel nursing had not existed, I can’t even imagine what would’ve happened during the pandemic,” he says. “Literally, certain hospitals would have run out of staff, and they would not have been able to take care of the patients.”

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