April 22nd, 2024 | Sterling

3 Ways Healthcare Staffing Firms Are Driving Innovation

Sterling recently joined a webinar with Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA), “How Leading Healthcare Staffing Firms are Driving Innovation.” Led by Ryan Garman, Director of Healthcare, and three of our healthcare clients: Aya Healthcare, Cross Country Healthcare, and CHG Healthcare, our webinar shared innovative strategies to address regional shortages, fill positions faster, and control costs. This webinar provided thought-leading discussions and examples on how our speakers are:

• Optimizing the candidate experience
• Automating for the purposes of driving scalability and cost control
• Adopting AI in healthcare

#1: Create a Positive Candidate Experience

Healthcare staffing agencies want to create great experiences for both their clients and their candidates. These businesses want to eliminate delayed starts and push starts alike, ensuring that their candidates are able to show up on time.

Kara Barngrover, VP of Credentialing and Compliance with Aya Healthcare, shared why they looked to streamline their drug & health screening ordering process to improve the candidate experience: “One of the tasks candidates enjoy the least is sitting in the lab. To alleviate the clinician burden and expedite onboarding, we refined and accelerated our drug & health screening ordering process. We facilitated hundreds of thousands of lab appointments for candidates, which was a significant logistical effort, by partnering with Sterling. Since then, we’ve been able to provide a customized solution that allows us to expedite registering and collecting drug & health screening services for our candidates. Not only have we been able to provide candidates with more flexibility and control when it comes to these services, we’re also making it more cost-effective for our organization.”

#2: Embrace the Power of Automation

During the Covid-19 pandemic, healthcare staffing firms experienced a surge in growth due to the high demand of healthcare workers. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to implement proper technical solutions to keep up with this demand. Although many firms had to hire more internal teams to help with the growth, over the long-term this wasn’t a scalable and cost-saving solution. Now, healthcare staffing firms are looking into ways to automate processes to drive scalability and control costs.

Sterling embraces the power of automation technology in order to deliver efficient and effective client and candidate experiences. Our credentialing automation solution enables healthcare staffing agencies to order only the services they need for their candidates. Agencies will also receive those results as individual credential-level results to be reused again in a future assignment.

Ryan shares more about this solution: “With credentialing automation, any prior credentials that a candidate has should automatically flow through to their new assignment. Any remaining credentials could then be automatically ordered with Sterling. Now you’re instantly delivering from the time the candidate is assigned to their job to the time they receive instructions to complete their drug & health screening services. Those credential-level results will flow directly into your systems of record, whether they’re homegrown systems, Bullhorn, Salesforce, etc. Wherever that may be, they are then going to automatically be delivered to your clients, and their appropriate credentialing packets are uploaded into the vendor management system (VMS). Overall this is delivering a much better candidate experience.”

Julie Dey, VP of Enterprise Solutions at Cross Country Healthcare, discussed how they approached automation: “We wanted to focus on the candidate experience and making it easy and simple, and we knew automation could help us drive that. Sterling has been a fantastic partner with us because they’ve helped us tie everything together, and we can use our technology to order the candidate’s package, whether that be in the background check, the drug screen, the titers, employee verification, all in one click. And results are delivered right into our ATS Bullhorn. This has allowed our team to use their time in different ways to focus back on the candidate experience. It has been a game changer for us and has really helped drive that on-time start.”

#3: Leverage AI to Stay Competitive

The interest in leveraging AI in healthcare continues to be a hot topic. SIA conducted an essay poll back in January asking how staffing agencies plan on using generative AI in their staffing operations for 2024. Many reported tasks including matching and analyzing data, creating job descriptions, and generating emails. Through their interviews with experts across the contingent workforce ecosystem, well-known staffing firms and suppliers, and VMS’s contingent workforce management program owners, SIA also came to the consensus that nearly 40% of current annual staffing activities are going to be replaced by AI within the next 3 years¹.

Our speakers had the opportunity to share their thoughts on AI in healthcare and areas they were seeking to adopt this fast-evolving technology. Amy Reed, VP of Product Management at CHG Healthcare, talked about her perspectives on AI adoption: “It’s critical to understand that the adoption of AI isn’t about technology replacing humans. It’s about staying competitive in an evolving market. If we don’t utilize AI, others will. Embracing AI allows for the establishment of proper guidelines, ethical standards, and ensuring that it aligns with your company’s values and objectives, but also remaining competitive.”

Never Stop Innovating

In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare staffing, firms need to adapt and innovate in order to thrive. By prioritizing the candidate experience, investing in automation technology, and embracing AI, healthcare staffing firms can continue to scale and provide an overall better experience for both their clients and candidates.

You can watch the full webinar here.

Sources
¹SIA’s The Coming Disruption: How the Staffing Industry Can Prepare for the AI Revolution

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