By Jeff Koyen
With the federal Covid-19 public health emergency behind us, many companies are now asking their remote employees to, please, come back to the office. Reluctant to return to the commuting life and related stressors, some workers are leaving for more flexible positions. In certain industries, this reluctance is becoming a full-blown crisis.
Healthcare is facing a similar problem.
“Nurse and allied health professionals got a taste for the travel life [during Covid],” says Matt Jensen, SVP of client services at RightSourcing, a division of Magnit. “Hospitals are trying to fill their core vacancies, [but it’s difficult] to pull clinicians back into full-time permanent positions.”
Healthcare executives are turning to contingent labor, or contracted and other non-full-time employees, since these on-demand talent pools are helping solve short-term shortages more efficiently.
But as Jensen advises, to get the most out of their contingent talent, hospitals should partner with a trusted managed service provider (MSP). Why? Because MSPs take more of a consultative approach, leveraging industry expertise around controlling costs, supplier optimization, worker compliance, automation and analytics. The knowledge and data-driven information MSPs can offer ultimately assists healthcare executives and other key stakeholders with their overall approach and decisions.
Here are four key ways MSPs can help stabilize labor costs and optimize workforce management in healthcare:
1. MSPs Provide Utilization Visibility And Market Guidance
Before Covid-19, hospitals used contingent labor to mainly cover seasonal census fluctuation, unexpected absences and hard-to-fill clinical specialties, Jensen says. Their reliance on contract workers was once in line with other industries, but now it’s outpacing them. This is cause for concern if these workers are managed in an ad-hoc, fragmented fashion.
“Hospitals are trying to get back to a normal state [that includes] a healthy mix of contingent labor,” Jensen explains. Hospital administrators are asking, “how do I get the cost of the contingent labor…down to or close to what I was paying pre-pandemic, and how do I attract and retain nurses and other clinical workers?”
Many hospital systems that don’t work with an MSP are unaware of how many contingent workers are in the building at any given time, or how much they are paying for those workers. For example, a healthcare organization might have 10 individual hospitals that, in turn, have dozens of floors and divisions apiece. With each facility and unit contracting its labor independently, obtaining an accurate headcount and competitive pricing is extremely difficult.
“One would think that hospitals and health systems would have some [way] to manage their contract labor headcount, but they don’t. [In] most cases, they don’t have whole system visibility and data reporting around it,” Jensen says.
MSPs address this challenge by centralizing the ordering process while maintaining robust hiring and headcount employment data. They also ensure this information is shared across the entire organization. “MSPs are helping [to] drive down costs through visibility and market-driven analytics reporting,” Jensen says. (Learn more: “The New Role for the MSP in Human Capital Management.”)
2. MSPs Keep Healthcare Workers In Compliance
Similarly, few healthcare organizations have a centralized management platform for ensuring that every worker has current certifications. It’s little wonder, given that maintaining compliance can be complex. Clinicians’ certifications and licenses can be valid from a year to three years, for instance, while Basic Life Support training must be renewed every two years and most nursing licenses must be renewed every three years.
Oversights can lead to serious problems.
“Hospitals are always under some type of audit from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) or Joint Commission (TJC), etc.,” Jensen says. “Any auditing body, at any given time, can walk into a facility and pull a compliance file on a worker.”
A top-tier MSP will ensure that all contingent workers being placed are fully compliant to work and take responsibility to ensure the workers stay compliant during the duration of their assignment. Put another way, this means the MSP takes responsibility for validating and maintaining current records—both at the time of hire and thereafter.
“We’re collecting and validating 100% of all compliance requirements that are needed before workers start an assignment and provide continuous compliance monitoring through the duration of the assignment, including background checks, certifications, licenses and all other client-specific requirements,” Jensen says.
3. MSPs Are Bringing Down Costs
With more healthcare professionals declining full-time work in favor of more flexible options, hospitals are facing a talent crunch. Desperate to fill open positions, many executives find themselves overpaying.
Working with an established MSP can help reverse this trend. “MSPs are helping health systems drive cost savings through rate and contract term negotiations with staffing companies, ultimately pulling down the overall cost of contingent workers,” Jensen says.
The key is the MSP’s vast pool of data, which can be mined and analyzed to spot previously undetectable trends. Consider, for example, an open nursing position that sees 15 qualified candidates apply at a certain billing rate. To analysts, this suggests a market saturation for that specialty, and the rate can be adjusted down accordingly without sacrificing talent quality or retention.
“We’re helping [hospitals] pull the rates down in an aggressive but controlled manner, and we’re doing that through data market analytics,” Jensen says. “It’s a fine balancing act.”
Learn more about how the contingent workforce is driving life sciences innovation while keeping costs down in our blog.
4. MSPs Encourage Full-Time Conversions
Whether it’s an unexpected absence, seasonal demand or a special project, contingent talent is typically used to fill staffing shortages. But many companies also hire with hopes of converting contractors to full-time status.
“[It’s] the try-before-you-buy scenario,” Jensen says. “[They] bring the worker in…and make sure it’s a match.”
With hospitals trying to reduce their contingent labor headcounts to pre-Covid levels, there’s a renewed push for converting nurses and technicians who willingly travel between assignments—known as “travelers” in the healthcare business.
Armed with a more complete picture of the healthcare labor market, MSPs can look for key indicators that specific travelers are more likely to stay within a given health system and, eventually, accept a full-time position. Living within a certain mile radius of an assignment, for example, is known to correlate with a higher conversion rate.
“When we talk with health systems…quality is top of mind, and now conversions,” Jensen notes.
Discover how you can successfully integrate the contingent workforce into your broader talent strategy and maximize its impact in your organization in our white paper.
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