When your health system often employs contingent workers and other flexible staff, it’s important to engage with a healthcare staffing agency you can trust. But sometimes, these agencies are viewed as the middleman between health systems and qualified staff. To truly work well together, health systems need to form partnerships with vendors. By forming a partnership, health systems can align their goals with those of the vendor, ensuring shifts are filled, contingent staff are qualified, and budgets are in line.
How to Form a Partnership With a Healthcare Staffing Agency
A successful partnership between a health system and a staffing agency should be symbiotic. Both parties should benefit from the partnership and have joint goals in mind. For a health system, the goals should be to hire qualified contingent workers to fill the open shifts of core staff. This should be done as quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible.
On the other hand, a healthcare staffing agency needs a health system that they can rely on. These agencies do the work of vetting and filtering through candidates, meaning that health systems don’t need to worry about hiring someone who might not work out. Staffing agencies are also dedicated to ensuring their clients — contingent workers — have enough work at facilities that can meet union regulations.
There are many benefits of a health system/healthcare staffing agency partnership:
- Contingent staff are vetted, so quality is never in question
- Shifts are filled faster, ensuring the quality of patient care is maintained
- Costs related to interviewing, hiring, and onboarding are lowered
- Vendor/health system relationship can adapt as goals change
So how can your health system form a productive partnership with a healthcare staffing agency? It all starts with implementing vendor-neutral technology that makes it all possible.
Importance of Vendor Neutrality
In a health system/staffing agency partnership, nothing is more important for the health system than vendor neutrality. After all, a hospital’s main aim is to bring on qualified workers quickly and at an affordable price. If there is a sense of competition between staffing vendors, or if one is favored over the other, the chances of having a wide float pool is diminished.
A vendor-neutral vendor management system (VMS) is built to support a successful vendor/health system partnership. With a VMS, it’s faster and easier to hire contingent workers, tier orders, and view key insights into staff performance and fill rates.
While a vendor-neutral VMS makes it easier to manage day-to-day staffing tasks, it also streamlines communication between the vendor and the facility. Using a VMS, facility managers can keep track of qualified contingent workers, expiring credentials, billing, invoicing, past orders, and other metrics related to contingent staffing. And if health systems are organized, communicating and partnering with staffing agencies become so much easier.
ShiftWise VMS for Vendor Engagement
A vendor-neutral VMS is an essential part of your health system’s strategic staffing plan. ShiftWise knows how important it is to have a vendor/health system partnership, and our VMS technology shows that. With ShiftWise, you have the tools to improve staffing processes and lessen time-to-fill rates: custom reports, metrics, float pools, vendor management, tiering, custom orders, and much more. Contact ShiftWise today to see how a vendor-neutral VMS fits in with your strategic staffing plan.
Resources:
https://www.shiftwise.com/knowing-top-staffing-vendors-can-cut-labor-costs-article/
https://www.shiftwise.com/using-vendor-neutral-vms-critical-article/