What is the Future of Healthcare Staffing Agencies?

A staffing agency is a bridge between end clients and workers, helping workers in finding the best temporary jobs and clients in managing their complete staffing needs. They fill a temporary labor need for their end clients from various healthcare, hospitality, events, construction, etc. 

 

The staffing industry accounts for over $120 billion in sales every year in the United States alone. As other industries have matured, they've reached their peak growth rates and are beginning to slowly recede while healthcare continues to grow relentlessly, adding more demand for short-term employees.

 

Staffing agencies employ more than 16 million people, and this number is expected to increase dramatically over the next few years as more healthcare roles open up. Over the past decade, the healthcare industry has experienced unprecedented growth in demand for medical services due to demographic changes of an aging population, longer life expectancy, and increased incidence of chronic diseases requiring continuous treatment. 

 

The Solution to Your Hospital's Nursing Shortage: Staffing Agencies

 

One way to solve this problem would be to hire more nurses, but hospitals might not have enough resources to hire medical staff, especially during a period of high demand. A more straightforward solution is to utilize staffing agencies with a network of potential employees who can help fill any temporary need a hospital might have. 

 

But in a fast-paced working environment like a hospital, their needs will change rapidly, which means they require people who can quickly adapt and manage their healthcare activities efficiently while still upholding an outstanding level of service.

 

The average recruitment process can take anywhere from 3 to 6 weeks while also costly. Staffing agencies are aware of this problem and have started developing technology that will help improve the efficiency at which they manage the information of their employees.

 

It has gotten to the point where most staffing agencies started working with healthcare companies to help them improve their onboarding process and make it easier for new employees who come in through third-party companies like AMN Healthcare, Omni Staffing, or Allied Resources Group (ARG).

 

These staffing agencies can range anywhere from small local firms to more prominent national names, which provide temporary workers across all specialties, including LPNs, CNAs, RNs, and even respiratory therapists. Facilities that work with these agencies include home health care services, ambulatory surgery centers, and long-term acute care facilities.

 

The average recruitment process can take anywhere from 3 to 6 weeks. By using technology, they are increasing the efficiency of this process by utilizing automated workflows that each step of the way help improve communication between all parties involved and reduce the number of errors and omissions.

 

A rundown of the latest trends in healthcare staffing : 

 

Healthcare staffing agencies worldwide need to keep up with these changes to provide efficient staff for hospitals and care homes alike. If you're not familiar with these trends in healthcare staffing, here is a quick rundown.

 

Self-servicing workers

 

A trend increasing in this industry is self-serve options when requesting help from an agency via your phone or device. The fact of the matter is more people want information at their fingertips and don't want to spend time on the phone listening to prompts or waiting for an agency representative to answer their questions.

 

Self-service software allows workers to provide, edit, and manage their information in your organization’s team member database portal. Eliminate the possibility of any error and problems while inputting the employing details by providing your employees the flexibility to edit and access their information. 

 

It reduces the dependency on HR for timely updating of the team member profile information and the probability of human errors when a team member fills his profile information instead of an HR person filling in on their behalf.

 

This tool can also be used as a performance management system that helps managers track goals, monitor progress, communicate expectations, set up training programs, or schedule reviews with ease. This is especially useful if you are looking forward to streamlining all these processes within a single platform without relying on multiple systems across departments like payroll or benefits administration. 

 

With new technologies, what used to be a two-way conversation with a client and agency representative can now happen behind the scenes of an app that clients can use on their own time and without any direct human interaction whatsoever.

 

Streamlined onboarding paperwork

 

A trend that is more popular in some countries than others is streamlining the onboarding process by removing as many obstacles as possible. In many staffing agencies across the world today, nurses still have to fill out reams of paperwork with boxes full of information about themselves before they are even allowed to start working via assignment. 

 

The process of completing paperless onboarding is not necessarily instantaneous. However, it still cuts down on all the unproductive wait time.

 

The future of streamlined paperless onboarding is entirely digital, which will further speed up the process and take it from 'streamlined' to 'instant. Some staffing agencies have already adopted an utterly paperless registration process where nurses can apply for an assignment online and immediately get access to their files, login credentials, and any other necessary information.

 

Instead of all that paper, digitalization is the future where agencies make it easier for nurses to input their information into an electronic system to start working more quickly.

 

Technology to track health and coverage

 

Another trend in the industry focuses on keeping up with technology to bring better care and coverage to clients who need them immediately. Today, major healthcare staffing agencies have hired top-level programmers and analysts to bring forward new software programs, apps, and other helpful tools to ensure all this data gets where it needs to go in the most efficient way possible. 

 

If a medical staffing agency doesn't stay ahead of the game when deploying new technologies, they risk falling behind and quickly losing business to their competitors.

 

Efficient timesheet management

 

Finally, a significant trend in healthcare staffing worldwide focuses on efficient timesheet management. For those who don't know, a timesheet manager can be described as a person or computer program that calculates the total amount of hours someone works over a given period. 

 

This includes agency workers, nurses, and clients within a hospital; for example, both parties need to track how much time has elapsed during any given assignment. Even if this might seem like it would make things more complicated, many agencies today are adopting this type of technology to manage time and money more efficiently than ever before. 

 

Today, timesheet management tools and solutions cover a wide range of needs, contributing to the significant growth in popularity over the last decade. This is good news for hospitals and other agencies that want to reduce costs and increase efficiencies throughout their operations.

 

If you are interested in learning more about each of these trends, be sure to continue hanging around this website for more updates about the latest changes to come to healthcare staffing agencies.

 

Final takeaway : 

 

Technology is being developed for almost any iteration to help streamline and improve a person's workflow in today's world. Healthcare staffing agencies worldwide embrace this trend by creating automated workflows that reduce errors and omissions in each step of patient care. 

 

When prospective employees input their information into an electronic system, these new technologies have removed much of the headache of filling out extensive paperwork. 

 

Technology has also improved communication between clients and healthcare staffing agencies by removing human interaction as much as possible throughout the onboarding process. Finally, timesheets keep track of how much time has elapsed during assignments to ensure everyone gets paid fairly for their work overtime.