What is Orbis Education?
Orbis Education offers collaborative nursing education solutions. We bring hospitals and universities together to provide an innovative answer to nursing shortages. Our program blends tradition and technology – offering online learning alongside hospital-located clinical coursework.
What is the business model?
We partner with existing nursing programs from top-tier nursing schools and, in conjunction with a hospital, provide outsourced services and distribute the educational program. The result is a pipeline of qualified, educated nursing graduates ready to work in the partner hospital. Because of the way we leverage technology and capital resources, we are able to offer our solutions with no up-front capital from your organization – we only get paid when we produce results.
What does Orbis do?
Our proprietary solutions can be broken into four key areas. When you work with Orbis, we will
- Collaborate with one of our existing educational partners or with a local nursing school to migrate their programs to an online format and provide the technology and infrastructure to deliver the online component
- Establish clinical sites within your hospital system
- Handle all marketing and student recruiting
- Administer the ongoing operations of site and manage the clinical learning component.
We already partner with local schools. How is this different?
You probably already have (or have been approached to create) some sort of collaboration with local nursing schools. Some of these are more successful than others. The first step in many of these partnerships involves the nursing school asking your healthcare system to write a check – and usually a big one. We won’t do that. We create and manage this collaboration – at our cost in the beginning – and you concentrate on doing what you do well, like providing quality patient care. (It is important to note, we are not in the business of displacing or replacing your current nursing school relationships. We must be realistic though – the nursing shortage will not be fixed by maintaining the status quo.)
Where did Orbis originate?
Founded in 2003, Orbis set out to examine the root causes of the nursing shortage and to develop a company and business model that would help address the problems. The founders met with thought leaders across the healthcare spectrum and used the knowledge and understanding from these meetings, along with decades of experience in healthcare and education, to create Orbis Education.
Who issues the nursing degree and is it recognized anywhere?
Currently, all graduates of our programs are awarded a degree from an affiliated university. All Orbis affiliated programs are accredited through the appropriate regulatory bodies. Orbis does not grant degrees and is not a school in any way. We create the partnerships that lead to education.
Why focus on nursing?
One in ten Americans works in healthcare and almost every specialty area faces an acute caregiver shortage. Orbis Education has focused its efforts on the nursing marketplace. Currently, one out of every eight jobs in nursing (125,000) is unfilled, and the shortage is expected to increase to as high as 800,000 by 2020. Unfortunately, existing colleges of nursing are at full capacity, have waiting lists, and generally turn away more qualified students than they accept.
What is the cost to the hospital?
There is no up-front investment to participate. Hospital customers are billed monthly on a “per-student” basis for the number of students currently enrolled. This monthly amount varies depending on the in-kind contributions your system makes to the program (i.e. office space, used equipment and supplies, and other resources). The typical healthcare system pays approximately $400 per month, per student for our services and we are very confident that this small amount pays for itself immediately.
How many students can be educated within my system?
This depends on the size of the facilities, the number of clinical opportunities that can be created, and the availability of faculty in the area. Typically, Orbis looks for larger healthcare organizations that can support a student population of 300 students.