Start-up connects health workers to new jobs

Ahmed Elsayyad, Zein Quraishi and Lamin Sonko, three friends and alumni of Hopkins, launched the Elsayyad Medical Group, a healthcare recruiting and consulting company, last September. The group works to connect healthcare providers with physicians and potential staff.

While attending Hopkins, founder and CEO Ahmed Elsayyad was struck by the idea that healthcare providers often have trouble finding and recruiting staff. Elsayyad began to realize that this was a service he could more efficiently provide to customers. During his gap year between graduating from Hopkins and attending medical school, he decided to take advantage of the opportunity.

“I was accepted into medical school my sophomore year summer, and I decided to graduate early so that I would have a year to do something I normally wouldn’t do. In my third year, I found that a practice in my hometown was really struggling to find physicians,” Elsayyad said. “For me it was kind of strange because I knew that there was a huge physician shortage, but I didn’t see any of the practical implications [until then]. So I talked to the practice, and I asked them if I could help them, no business in mind or anything like that. I started there, and I basically got them an infectious disease doctor and made $15,000.”

Quraishi, the Chief Marketing Officer, graduated from Hopkins last May with a B.A. in Public Health and is now obtaining his Masters in Health Administration at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Quraishi and Sonko joined the project after Elsayyad told them about the opportunities he found in healthcare recruitment and consultation.

“This past summer, Ahmed went ahead and started it. When I came back to Hopkins in the fall, we spoke about it, and I said I wanted to be a part of the team. Ever since then we just kind of got the ball rolling. We’re working on a multitude of different contracts throughout the country,” Quraishi said.

Quraishi outlined how the company is starting to answer the big healthcare questions posed by providers.

“Healthcare is shifting upstream. Whereas traditionally there was a focus on getting patients into offices and into hospitals, now we’re seeing a change where providers and executives are being incentivized to keep patients healthy within their community,” he said. “Right now our main offerings are healthcare recruiting and staffing. So, for example, a client will tell us what their expectations are first, then we’ll try to assess how large their practice is, how many patients they have coming, and we kind of use all of those factors to give our recommendation of whether or not they should hire a NP, a PA or a physician, and how many they should hire.”

“Another service line we offer is medical equipment,” Quraishi said. “A client approaches us; we determine what their needs are, what the appropriate level of equipment is, and at what frequency they’ll need it; and then we have preferred companies and suppliers that we work with to get them the most value.”

Although Elsayyad Medical Group has only been an active business since the fall, it has quickly garnered attention. Elsayyad explains that the company’s specialization in healthcare recruitment has slowly made it a forerunner in its sector.

“A big thing right now that I think is really interesting is that we’re basically beginning to become a thought leader in the healthcare recruiting world,” Elsayyad said. “I recently got interviewed by people at WebMD about healthcare recruiting and advanced healthcare networks. We’re really young and we just started this so we were really surprised.”

Elsayyad also reiterated that as an aspiring doctor, working in his own company with different physicians has been an important learning experience.

“Some parts of my job are really fulfilling, especially talking to physicians,” he said. “I’m going to be a physician, and Lamin is also going to be a physician in the future, so it’s nice to get that perspective where we’re constantly interacting with the people that we’re going to become.”

Quraishi thinks the business partnership is successful because it grew out of a strong friendship and a shared interest.

“Even though we’re partners, I’d call us brothers. We kind of grew up together in undergrad in a sense — we were friends throughout the entire process. So our relationship is very organic,” he said.

“Our relationship doesn’t revolve around a business, it revolves around brotherhood, which extends far before even starting this business. Throughout the whole undergraduate process we always had in the back of our minds that we wanted to be able to leverage our experiences at Hopkins, the knowledge we gained at Hopkins and the knowledge and experience we gained in our careers to provide the best practices and services to the healthcare community at large.”