More than half the healthcare facilities in the US now partner with a managed service provider (MSP), and that number will likely continue to climb as the industry learns from COVID-19.
The movement toward MSPs started long before the pandemic, with a push toward needing to have expenditure controls and a centralized source of credentialing for contingent staffing.
“And when the pandemic hit, if a hospital didn't have some sort of centralized source like an MSP, they were truly at a loss, and so they had to create these haphazard war rooms,” Health Carousel VP Ariella Gottlieb said.
A typical healthcare HR team manages relationships with as many as 100 different vendors.
A key lesson of COVID when it comes to contingency staffing: If an urgent or critical need pops up, the internal team may not have the time or resources to quickly hire top talent.
“So the timing is right for a lot of these systems to say, we really need more than just a transactional relationship. We need a partner,” Gottlieb said. “We need somebody who has all of these services and can take this off of our shoulders.”
Think of the right MSP as an extension of your HR department, there to recruit top talent and to help streamline the management of all temporary staff under one umbrella -- from hiring to credentialing and beyond.
“Then the staffing office is relieved of a lot of those duties, and can go in and out -- depending on their schedule -- of interviewing, selecting, confirming, checking, credential, so on and so forth,” Gottlieb said.
Gottlieb spoke in an exclusive audio interview in more depth about MSPs, as well as how to address the growing demand of an aging population.
