Gusto People Platform Helps Cortex Scale and Support Massive Employee Growth

In a matter of months, Cortex Health went from being an employer of 10 in one state to an employer of over 500 spanning 40 states.

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Gusto has been instrumental in helping Cortex Health scale

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Meet HR and tax compliance standards

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Scale employee satisfaction

About Cortex Health

Where: Lehi, Utah
Industry: Healthcare
Employees: 500+
Joined Gusto: November 2018

Cortex works with over 500 home health care registered nurses that serve more than one million patients. Their core business is to conduct HIPAA-compliant follow up calls to patients; managing who to call, when to call, and what to say based on the preferences provided by each nurse. Cortex has been vital in supporting in-home care nurses during the pandemic as they continue to assist some of the most vulnerable patients, especially when it comes to crisis care coordination and contact tracing. Cortex’s services help nurses to retain patients by establishing loyalty, reduce hospitalizations, identifying clinical concerns early, and improve satisfaction by tracking key elements of a patient’s experience throughout the care continuum.

Cortex has been a Gusto customer since 2018 utilizing the platform’s health benefits, payroll and 401k products. At the beginning of 2020, Cortex had 10 employees, but saw a huge demand for their services when COVID-19 hit, requiring them to hire hundreds of nurses across the US quickly.

How Cortex quickly and successfully grew their business

Remote hiring and onboarding becomes simple and speedy

Using Gusto simplified Cortex’s expansion process by increasing velocity for hiring, and handling Cortex’s complex registration and compliance needs. Automating these tasks that had previously been done via a time-consuming manual process was essential for Cortex, saving them both time and headaches and allowing them to focus on what’s most important—positioning their business to best help patients during a pandemic.

“We don’t have a HR team at Cortex, so using Gusto to maximize efficiency was important so that we’re able to scale and grow successfully. Gusto made it easier to not only do onboarding, but also track it all from a compliance standpoint. We estimate we save one tree per year and five to ten hours per week in additional HR time by using Gusto,” says Josh Albrechtsen, President and Co-Founder of Cortex Heath.

HR made easyWe don’t have a HR team at Cortex, so using Gusto to maximize efficiency was important so that we’re able to scale and grow successfully.
President & Co-Founder,
Cortex Heath

Essential HR and tax compliance is seamless

Tax season is a stressful time for business owners, especially within the healthcare industry. With so many rules and regulations pertaining to compliance at both the state and federal levels, hiring in new states can be extremely difficult to navigate.

“We were doing everything ourselves before and honestly, we struggled with the compliance aspect. We hired all of our nurses out of our main office in Utah and after meeting with our legal team realized that the nurses would need to file taxes within their respective states of residence,” says Cortex. “The job of scaling and registering these nurses across 40 states felt impossible, but Gusto helped to make that easier by simplifying the process and automating certain tasks, saving us so much time. It was relieving to know that Gusto could submit certain state and federal taxes documents on our behalf and that they would be filed accurately and on time. Gusto has been instrumental in helping us scale taxwise nationwide.”

Collecting and prioritizing employee feedback to support rapid growth is made easy

Company culture plays an important role at Cortex. The executive team meets frequently to discuss the state of the company culture and what they can do to boost employee morale.

“We’re a big advocate for deliberate culture and trying to create it,” Cortex says. A key factor in understanding employee needs has been reviewing feedback obtained through Gusto’s automated monthly satisfaction surveys. Cortex says that these have been pivotal in gaining insights for maintaining company culture as they grow.
Cortex recognizes that their employees are their greatest asset and making sure that their team feels supported is essential.

Through Gusto’s employee satisfaction survey, Cortex discovered that 401k matching was top of mind for their employees, eventually resulting in them implementing that benefit. In addition to utilizing the healthcare benefits Gusto offers, Cortex also aims to introduce new benefits on a regular basis.

One of those benefits encourages financial health. Cortex offers its employees access to Gusto’s Cash Accounts, a feature within Gusto Wallet that enables workers to automatically save a portion of their paycheck every pay period. Cortex attests that offering this feature has aided with fostering a culture of savings, “Providing Cash Accounts as a benefit has been influential in promoting financial health throughout the company and changing the way our employees approach savings.”

“We were concerned that company satisfaction would decline because we hired so many nurses so quickly, established a management structure overnight and wanted to double down on more training, but our scores have been really positive, around 90% or above. We believe people have been optimistic during the pandemic because they’ve been able to help in some way.”

Looking to the future

Cortex aims to keep the momentum going as the company continues to grow while maximizing efficiency on the HR management side. They note that they’ve gone from using 15 percent of Gusto’s features to 90 percent and that Gusto’s support is essential as they continue to grow and scale.

“The dream in using software is that it makes you so efficient that you theoretically need fewer people to do some tasks, reducing headcount. The reality is that software often requires you to hire somebody just to run it. But we’ve found a couple of vital tools that make us really efficient and Gusto is one of them, allowing us to run payroll and manage benefits while continuing to manage the daily operations of running our business.”

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