As internal and external pressures to boost margins and remain competitive continue to ripple through the health care industry, workers and organizations need to find new ways to improve efficiency and cut costs.

Manual administrative tasks contribute to a major drain on resources, as they require considerable time to input data, transfer files and perform other necessary, but laborious, duties. Medical staffing software allows recruiters and agencies to automate many of these time-consuming administrative tasks, such as pushing emails, filling forms and more.

Health care administrative costs rising

The inherent complexity in health care staffing necessitates many moving pieces, processes and projects in the back office, such as candidate recruiting, credential management, scheduling and payroll and invoicing. Each of these requires a significant number of interacting workflows that all need to converge appropriately to ensure maximum efficiency.

Unfortunately, all of this back-office work eats up a considerable amount of overhead costs for organizations, which limits the ability for staffing agencies to improve margins and reach growth milestones.  

In fact, the overhead costs associated with medical administration continue to surge. According to American Center for Progress, the U.S. health care system uses an estimated $361 billion to cover administrative costs each year. CNNMoney reported that, with administrative costs accounting for 8 percent of health care spending in the U.S., the country far outpaces the global average of 3 percent.  

While much of these costs are associated with hospital systems and private practices, medical staffing agencies are also responsible for a significant portion of these expenses.

As competition continues to increase, agencies and recruiters need tools at their disposal to trim administrative costs. This can be accomplished in several ways, but two surefire strategies are increasing efficiencies and automating manual processes.

Boosting administrative efficiencies

One way medical staffing agencies can cut their administrative costs is by introducing efficiencies in employee workflows.

Inefficient processes and kinks in staff workflows lead to significant lost resources. From time spent on duplicative data entry to candidate resumes to the unavailability of staff to take on multiple tasks, there's plenty of ways to unwillingly flush money down the drain.

And sometimes, despite the best efforts by management to staff to identify and implement efficiencies on their own, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to do so in a comprehensive fashion across the entire enterprise.

However, agencies that utilize sophisticated staffing recruitment software gain access to a variety of tools that boost administrative efficiencies. From parsing and populating the system with information from bulk resume purchases to capturing time and attendance and managing pay frequency for clients, medical staffing software is an immediate game changer for agencies.

Reducing the time spent on these tasks improves overall staff productivity, allowing agencies to focus on other projects and grow their revenue potential. 

Automating administrative processes

A step beyond merely boosting efficiencies is to automate these administrative tasks. This can ultimately save money for medical staffing agencies by reducing or even eliminating manual processes, repetitive data input and the potential for human errors.

Using medical staffing software for automating aspects of candidate searches, recruitment, onboarding and employee scheduling significantly speeds up all of these process.

Instead of wading through countless resumes to locate individuals with specific qualifications and the right credentials, medical staffing software lets agencies simply enter in the need details and immediately find caregivers with the matching skills and availability. Then, with a quick click of a button, an integrated auto-dialer and mobile text features instantly reaches out to everyone on the list, allowing interested caregivers to message back for their reply. 

Further, with access to a vast database of highly qualified candidates offered through medical staffing software, agencies can fill vacancies faster and ensure the best nurses and physicians are matched the right open position.

This is just one of many different ways medical staffing agencies can automate processes and really go above and beyond the competition. This allows staff to process larger workloads while lowering the burden of having to manually fill forms and file documents.

Click here to learn more about how BlueSky Medical Software boosts efficiencies and automates administrative processes for medical staffing agencies.