Rebecca Love never planned on becoming a nurse. Or a C-suite executive.

Love was accepted into law school but her mother told her: “We have plenty of strong lawyers in the world. We don’t have enough strong nurses.” 

So Love agreed to apply to one nursing school to please her mother—Northeastern. 

“I always hoped I would make a positive impact on the world,” says Love, who earned a master’s degree in nursing from Northeastern. “I just traditionally hadn’t thought that nursing was the route that could do that. Being accepted to Northeastern and getting into nursing changed my entire life.”

Nursing then launched her into the business world.

As a nurse, Love founded, and was the principal of, HireNurses.com in 2013. The website connects nurses to career opportunities that fit 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 nurse innovation and entrepreneurship from 2016 to 2018. 

Love is now the chief clinical officer of IntelyCare, an online service that provides qualified nurses to fill shifts at post-acute health-care facilities. 

She is also an author and passionate spokesperson for the nursing profession.

“She’s amazing,” says Julie Norton, Northeastern’s director of academic ceremonies, who worked with Love during her time as senior development officer in the Bouve College of Health Sciences. “Extraordinary as far as nurse innovation.”

Norton watched how 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 some nurse about what was going on or starting a company,” Norton says. “She’s such a shining example of what Northeastern (represents)—entrepreneur, entrepreneurial, amazing nurse—that has then turned into when she speaks, people listen.”

Before working at Northeastern, Love worked in various nursing positions at 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, whoever thought that was possible,” says Love. “I only thought about the role of bedside nurses.” 

The idea of having nurses become innovators didn’t sink in entirely until 2015, when her company HireNurses.com was struggling. A friend suggested she attend a hackathon, an event in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming.

While in the room, Love realized she was the only nurse in there and began forming the idea to hold one entirely for nurses. 

So, she connected with professor Nancy Hanrahan at Northeastern University, who advised her to hold the first nurse-only hackathon. 

The event sold out. Every hospital attended. 

Afterwards, the group built the first nurse innovation program in the country, launching in 2016. The program enabled nurses to combine their experience at the bed-side with creating 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 forefront of the future of their campaign,” says Love. 

“That was a big deal,” Love says. 

For the first time in three to four decades, nurses started to see themselves differently as a profession that could be more than what was defined by others, Love says.

They do have a greater voice, but we’re going to need stronger voices in nursing to be able to drive this forward.

Rebecca Love, a Northeastern graduate and the chief clinical officer of IntelyCare

Nurses are frontline providers and have been innovating since Florence Nightingale, says Maria van Pelt, clinical professor at the Northeastern School of Nursing who worked with Love during her time at the school. 

“With being the frontline providers, we are always developing innovative solutions to many of the health-care challenges that we’re faced with in everyday practice,” Pelt says. “I think innovative solutions are ways that provide our patients with the optimal best care. I think that is a really important role of nursing.”

What stands out the most about Love is her thought leadership and how it has impacted the global health-care community, Pelt says. 

“She motivates people around the world to implement positive change,” says Pelt. “She empowers them.”

Love would have left the profession like so many others if she never discovered the power of innovation. 

According to the National Institute of Health, the nursing profession continues to face shortages due to a lack of potential educators, high turnover and inequitable workforce distribution. 

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that more than 275,000 additional nurses are needed from 2020 to 2030. Nurse burnout is still 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 he needed some help. In response, Love told him that the problem with staffing agencies and all the hospitals and health-care systems is they treat nurses like commodities. 

“You treat them as though they are an endless supply of a 24 set, a cog in a wheel for a 24/7 need, and they have no value,” says Love. “That’s how you treat us, and I don’t care that we’re in the midst 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, he called Love back, asking for a different conversation, admitting that Love was right. 

He asked Love to come on board as the voice for nurses within the organization and to make sure the company is building solutions to sustain the nursing profession and invest in them so that they are better. 

Love decided to join the company to help long-term care facilities succeed. 

In nursing, there is a mindset that if a nurse makes a mistake, they are fired, Love says. But often, those mistakes happen because the nurses aren’t trained for those settings. IntelyCare works to remedy that problem by providing credentialing, clinical quality and education to potential workers remotely. 

Love says the method allows the company to educate and retain nurses instead of firing them. 

At Northeastern’s innovation program, Love learned that she could redefine what a profession looks like and that nurses can reach different levels of careers than they ever did before. 

“If you look at nurses that are my grandmother’s age, and then you look at nurses of my mother’s age, and then you look at nurses of our age, there’s been a massive shift of where those nurses can sit,” Love says. “They do have a greater voice, but we’re going to need stronger voices in nursing to be able to drive this forward.”

Beth Treffeisen is a Northeastern Global News reporter. Email her at b.treffeisen@northeastern.edu. Follow her on Twitter @beth_treffeisen.