Healthcare services · Clinical workforce

CareRev

A per diem shift marketplace that let hospitals book local nurses by the day. Built on independent contractors, it added a W-2 route in 2025 and was acquired by IntelyCare in a deal that closed on December 23, 2025.

Five in the morning

Dana is a nurse in St. Louis. She is 29. She picks up hospital shifts on the CareRev app, and the hardest part, she told researchers writing for the Roosevelt Institute, is not the nursing. It is the waiting.

She claims a shift, arranges childcare for her son, then waits to learn whether the hospital still wants her.

“It’s a gamble . . . I’ll wake up at 5:00 in the morning and I’ll find out if I’m canceled or not,” she said.

If the hospital cancels more than two hours ahead, those researchers reported, CareRev pays her nothing. Closer in, she sometimes earns two to four hours of the shift. If a hospital shortens her day once she is there, the unworked hours go unpaid. If she cancels late, her attendance rating falls.

That asymmetry is not a defect in the product. It is close to the point of it. A hospital that can add and release a nurse on a few hours notice has turned a fixed cost into a variable one. The variability lands on Dana.

What the hospitals were trying to fix

Before the pandemic, labor had already passed half of a hospital’s total expenses, according to the Healthcare Financial Management Association figure CareRev cited in its own 2021 funding release. Then COVID-19 arrived, nurses left the bedside in large numbers, and travel nurse agencies raised rates beyond what finance offices could defend.

CareRev’s pitch was arithmetic. A hospital posts a shift. A nurse twenty minutes away claims it from a phone. No thirteen week contract, no housing stipend, no agency markup.

The nurse who built it

Will Patterson was a trauma ICU nurse in California. By the company’s own account he was fighting burnout, left to work as an independent nurse contractor for an ambulance company,, and found the work again there. He started CareRev in 2015.

The biography matters because the model follows from it. Patterson was not building a staffing agency with better software. He was trying to turn every nurse into the sort of independent operator he had become. The company put it plainly in 2023: “At CareRev, we empower healthcare professionals to become their own entrepreneurs.”

That is also a legal position, and it is where the story turns.

Boom, then correction

April 2021 brought a $50 million Series A led by Transformation Capital, with Industry Ventures, Gaingels and angels including Zach Coelius and Michael Siebel. Thirty hospitals and health systems. Eleven thousand professionals.

In 2022 came a second $50 million round from ShawSpring, Tribe Capital, Transformation Capital, High Sage and MBX, then $70 million in committed debt from JPMorgan Chase in November, both figures disclosed by the CEO rather than by a filing. The AI Now Institute, citing PitchBook reporting, puts the 2022 valuation at $600 million.

Then the correction. In January 2023 Patterson published a note setting out three year priorities and, near the end, announcing layoffs. A second round followed in June, confirmed to Becker’s without a number. That same month Patterson resigned, after The Information began asking about allegations of drug use and lax vetting of nurses. Becker’s reported the company’s answer: “much of what was included is categorically untrue and a lot was taken out of context.” Brandon Atkinson became CEO on June 2, 2023. Patterson stayed as senior adviser and board member.

The pivot nobody announced loudly

In August 2023 CareRev told Fierce Healthcare that its platform “continues to support qualified 1099 employees picking up daily shifts in healthcare settings.” On September 4, 2025, it announced something different: hospitals could now reach a W-2 flexible workforce through the marketplace and a network of partners. The hospitals page now advertises W-2 nurses. The partners page still lists 1099, W2, agency and IRP models side by side.

Twelve months before that announcement, a California plaintiffs firm sued Care.Stat!, Inc. doing business as CareRev over the classification of its healthcare workers. Two years before that, The Markup reported that an earlier California misclassification case against the same entity had settled, after the company denied the allegations.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: CareRev built real distribution. Named health systems used it, one Chicago hospital spent seven figures a year on it, and hundreds of thousands of shifts moved through it. What the record does not show is a settled answer to the question the model rests on: whether the nurse who claims a shift is running a business or holding a job. The company changed its own answer in September 2025 without explaining why, and was sold four months later.

What to watch

• Whether the CareRev brand survives inside IntelyCare, which markets itself as a W-2 employer carrying payroll taxes, workers compensation and malpractice cover.
• A ruling in Care.Stat! Inc v. Litehouse Health WI LLC, in particular on the motion to apply California law, since California is where the classification exposure sits.
• State legislation. Exemption bills have advanced in several states while New York moved the other way in 2025.
• Any disclosure of the acquisition price. Neither company has published one.

In their words

Related companies

• Pair Team: Shared investor: Gaingels. A California medical group delivering Medicaid Enhanced Care Management to people living in shelters, cars and encampments
• Loop Health: Also in Healthcare Services. A Pune company that sells group health insurance as a licensed broker and employs its own doctors to deliver the everyday care those policies do not cover
• Curebase: Also in Healthcare Services. A clinical trial company that turned drive-through testing lines into research sites, then closed its services arm and became a software vendor
• CareLedger: Also in Healthcare Services. A Y Combinator startup that promised employees free medical care by steering self-insured employers to the cheapest good doctor for a given procedure

Sources

1. Public recordCare.Stat! Inc v. Litehouse Health WI LLC et al, No. 2:25-cv-00673, docketE.D. Wisconsin · filed May 7, 2025
2. Public recordForm D, CareRev Capsule, a series of FundRx Master Fund I, LLCSEC · Jul 29, 2019
3. Public recordFourth Circuit preserves $9 million award to misclassified nursesOgletree Deakins · Jul 31, 2025
4. IndependentWhat Happens When Nurses Are Hired Like UbersThe Markup and The 19th · Oct 5, 2023
5. IndependentUber for Nursing, parts I and IIRoosevelt Institute, Dec 2024; AI Now Institute, 2026
6. IndependentIntelyCare acquires healthcare staffing platform CareRevStaffing Industry Analysts · Jan 13, 2026
7. IndependentGig nursing platform CareRev plans layoffsBecker’s · Jun 16, 2023
8. IndependentCEO of Uber for nurses out after investigationBecker’s · Jun 7, 2023
9. IndependentPenalties action filed against CareRev over classificationLebe Law · Sep 2024
10. CompanyCareRev announces $50 million in Series A fundingPR Newswire · Apr 26, 2021
11. CompanyRefocusing on our technology, a note from the CEOCareRev blog · Jan 2023
12. CompanyCareRev enables hospitals to leverage W-2 healthcare workforcePR Newswire · Sep 4, 2025
13. CompanyCareRev hospitals, partners, about and FAQ pagescarerev.com · accessed Sep 23, 2026