Healthcare staffing agencies are operating in the midst of an evolving industry. As the number of insured patients continues to grow due to the Affordable Care Act, and the proportion of physicians and nurses fails to keep pace, agencies must ensure they have the means to remain relevant.
Without the ability to remain flexible and adaptable, healthcare staffing agencies will find that their services quickly become irrelevant - despite the surging growth in health care staff demand.
Healthcare staffing agencies can take a lesson from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his description of the route to irrelevancy. Bezos discussed the importance of organizations and their leadership always remaining on Day 1 - that period of a company's life when vitality and dynamism are high and where patient experimentation and acceptance of failure are a daily reality. This Day 1 period can last decades or longer, provided the company doesn't end up on Day 2.
"Day 2 is stasis," Bezos explained. "Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1."
So how do healthcare staffing companies avoid falling down the slippery slope toward stasis and irrelevancy and stay firmly planted in Day 1?
1. Make faster decisions
One of the ways to maintain that Day 1 energy and dynamism is by making high-quality and high-velocity decisions. Day 2 companies often make many high-quality decisions, but the problem is that they tend to spend too much time equivocating. This is especially true of well-established organizations with rigid corporate structures and strict compliance policies.
Speed matters in business, no matter if it's an internet retailer or healthcare staffing agency.
"Taking too long to make decisions leads to lost business."
Bezos noted waiting for 90 percent of the information to make a decision probably means you're moving too slowly. Instead, make decisions with around 70 percent of the information. In many instances, course correcting can be much less costly than being too slow.
For staffing agencies, waiting too long or taking too much time to make a decision leads to lost business. Workforce management software specifically designed for the healthcare industry uses attractively designed dashboards that make it easier for agencies to grasp the status of contingent labor spend or available staff with a quick glance. This allows for faster and more informed decision-making.
2. Be flexible
Nothing makes a company irrelevant more quickly than not being flexible enough to respond to a shifting industry landscape. Healthcare staffing agencies are no exception.
With demand for travel nurses, locum tenens and per diem costs on a steep upswing, staffing agencies must have the ability to quickly fill positions of all sorts at the spur of the moment. Simply relying on one subset of candidates, be it just clinical nurses or just physicians, will leave the agency unable to meet the changing industry needs.
3. Utilize the right technology
Clearly Amazon took advantage of the networking capacity offered by the internet to become the de facto supplier for online retail shopping and home delivery. If they hadn't done it, someone else would have.
In the same way that Amazon leveraged the internet to grow their business (and essentially reinvent retail shopping), healthcare staffing agencies must also utilize workforce management technology to remain relevant. Relying on outdated pen-and-paper scheduling methods takes too much time and energy, making the process inefficient and dragging down the agency's competitiveness.
The right staffing technology streamlines workflows and automates many of these manual processes. This includes formatting and custom designing invoices or conducting audit reports of any worker, no matter where or when they worked.
Mobile technology is another type of technology that staffing agencies need to ensure they're leveraging to their full advantage. A mobile app that allows for order confirmation, schedule retrieval, credential management and instant messaging streamlines these aspects and lets everyone remain on the same page in real time.
How BlueSky Medical Staffing Software can help
Designed specifically for the healthcare sector, BlueSky Medical Staffing Software provides staffing agencies with the workforce management solution they need to remain relevant in a shifting industry.
Staffing agencies can capture all the jobs they want to fill and then rapidly and easily match the best-suited candidates to open positions. This whole process takes a few quick clicks from start to finish.
Staffing agencies utilizing BlueSky Medical Staffing Software can increase operational efficiency, lower spend leakage and better leverage pools of pre-qualified candidates. Further, the capabilities of BlueSky's Medical Staffing Software also provide agencies crucial insights into contingent workforce performance, which allows them to make more accurate candidate reviews.
Click here to learn how BlueSky Medical Staffing Software helps healthcare staffing agencies remain relevant in an increasingly dynamic world.
