Managing the Growing Complexity of Healthcare Staffing

The U.S. Staffing industry sends nearly two million people to work each day through thousands of individual staffing firms.  To continue to grow and to gain market share, staffing firms must develop more sophisticated systems, processes and support service models.   When you add on the unique requirements of healthcare staffing, the model becomes increasingly complex.  To meet those requirements—and to survive on today’s razor thin margins—effective, integrated technological tools and outside professional services are nearly essential.

Whether your healthcare staffing firm is a small, mid-sized or larger, multi-regional independent, the time, costs and technical challenges associated with developing and maintaining efficient and scalable infrastructure are daunting.  (Infrastructure being the basic, underlying framework or components of the system and organization needed to support the company’s core functions and activities.)  When you add the burdens unique to healthcare staffing, (i.e. medical malpractice insurance, state licensing, special screening, testing and credentialing), costs increase exponentially.

Most of the best applications and service providers available offer narrowly focused solutions that address only one aspect of a staffing firm’s operational model.  Often, they do not integrate into complementing and essential legacy systems easily or at all.   As a result, most staffing companies still manage manual, labor intensive processes, duplicate data sources and cumbersome import/export processes to move data from one system to another.  In the process the same information is handled over and over again, increasing the opportunity for error, corruption or failure, consuming valuable time and draining efficiency from the organization and its P&L. 

Large staffing firms know that highly effective infrastructure optimizes their ability to provide high quality service at a scale that allows a lower price point, making it tough for firms of lesser size to compete.  At the same time, more and more independent staffing firms are discovering that the investment of time and money that is required to build and maintain competitive infrastructure may not produce a great return for them.  This is especially true when the owners’ ultimate exit strategy involves selling or merging with a larger competitor that already has this infrastructure in place. 

In a merger or acquisition, there is rarely a situation where it makes strategic sense for the combined companies to maintain two separate systems.  It is not uncommon for a staffing firm to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in infrastructure only to learn it has no value to a buyer whatsoever.

So how does a small or mid-sized staffing firm create and maintain the scalable infrastructure needed to remain competitive and to efficiently manage the increasing complexity of healthcare staffing, yet still make money?

More and more are partnering with a solutions provider that can offer a broader spectrum of integrated systems and services, and even end-to-end solutions addressing all the business needs illustrated in the sidebar, including the applications, systems, and human resources to support both front and back office requirements.

Staffing industry executives understand the value of outsourced services and SaaS (Software as a Service) better than most, but still, pulling it all together strategically and logistically is far easier said than done.  Aside from the obvious, when integrating key systems and processes, they must take into consideration operational efficiencies and critical performance measures, statutory and contractual compliance requirements, customer service, communication and satisfaction. And then there is the implementation itself.

It only makes sense for staffing firms to leverage the resources, knowledge and technical capabilities of experienced industry-specialized solution providers.  Staffing companies should partner with those providers who can tie both essential front and back office systems together, achieve greater productivity, and help contain  infrastructure costs.  The right provider partners bring highly scalable service models that relieve non-core workload, maximize ROI, and allow staffing firms to focus on client partnerships and strategic, business-building activities.