Staffing Robot - Healthcare Staffing Technology, Design & Marketing Blog

Broadlane WFX Rebrands to Prolucent & Some Rebranding Tips

A couple of months ago I wrote about AMN's re-branding campaign. Now, another major player in the healthcare staffing industry has gone through a similar effort. Broadlane's Workforce Management Services has rebranded itself from Broandlane WFX to Prolucent.

If you're considering a rebranding campaign for your staffing agency now is the perfect time to do it. The trends in the healthcare staffing industry have been bleak over the last 1.5 years. However, as things start to pick up again hospitals will be re-evaluating their staffing agency partners. Approaching them with an improved identity, renewed focus and new service offerings can go along way toward keeping the attention of your clients or getting new ones to notice you.

If you do decide to rebrand I offer the following tips:

1. Make sure you understand what all is involved with this effort. A brand is more than a logo. You don't want to simply update your logo or website and overlook the rest of your promotional material. Promoting an inconsistent brand sends a bad message to the market. 
2. If you rename your company or product chose something that's easy to pronounce. Although 'Broadlane WFX' wasn't a great name, I'm not sure the name 'Prolucent' is any better. Many people are going to spend time trying to figure out how to pronounce it or just skip the exercise all together and continue to call them Broadlane. Further, if you change your company name to something in another language (say for example 'Concerro') be sure the name means what you think it does.
3. Do your homework and work with reputable companies that know what they're doing and won't overcharge you. If you don't know where to start contact me and I can help point you in the right direction.

Changing your brand can be tricky and if done incorrectly, it can be disastrous. There is a lot to consider, including the current equity your brand has or doesn't have, before going down this path. However, if AMN can pull it off with all the equity they had in their brand, most likely you can too too.

Concerro, Inc. Acquires RES-Q Healthcare Systems

Yesterday, Concerro, Inc., announced their acquisition of RES-Q Healthcare Systems. Concerro, formerly BidShift, has come along way since their inception in 1999. Offering more now than just shift bidding technology, through acquisitions and proprietary software development they also offer incident response and management systems as well as a core scheduling and staffing application for hospitals.

RES-Q Healthcare Systems is one of the largest providers of hospital core staff scheduling systems. They were recently recognized as the 2009 Best in KLAS software market segment leader for Staff and Nurse Scheduling.

The acquisition is a good strategic move for Concerro and will better position them in the market through this rapid expansion of their customer base.

RES-Q’s award winning labor management and scheduling applications are the only solutions that align completely with Concerro’s strategy to help healthcare organizations control labor costs through optimization rather than reduction,” said Graham Barnes, CEO of Concerro.

via www.businesswire.com

My Interview on Staffing Talk

Last Friday, Gregg Dourgarian of Tempworks Staffing Software and the blog Staffing Talk had me on his call in show. We discussed several topics such as ShiftWise Healthcare Vendor Management, the current economic state of the healthcare staffing industry, the social media application foursquare, Social Media Marketing (SMM) and staffing agencies and my blog Staffing Robot.

Gregg is an active blogger and continues to try new things. He is definitely helping to further advance the use technology and social media in the staffing industry. Thanks for having me on your show Gregg.

You can watch the show here.

Should Hospitals Focus on Eliminating Their Agency Staff?

It's a question that never seems to go away. Can hospitals truly eliminate all of their agency usage? Perhaps a better question is - should they? From a management perspective, the healthcare staffing industry seems to be one of the last to see the usage of temporary labor as being negative.

By now we've all read the L.A. Times article that highlighted some bad practices of a few staffing agencies and used these examples to paint the entire industry with more negative stereotypes.

The American Staffing Association had a great response to the article that was necessary and expected. What was nice to see, however, is people like Rebecca Hendren from Healthleaders Media who has written a couple of excellent articles on how hospitals can better manage staffing agency professionals. In her first article Rebecca discussed how positive work environments and better orientation practices can improve the process for working with agency staff.

This week, Rebecca wrote another article about how hospitals are making effective use of technology to reduce their reliance on agency staff. She points out hospitals that have effectively deployed internal staff scheduling software to fill more shifts with internal staff, offer more scheduling flexibility and improve morale. The Healthleaders Media article made several great points on this topic and I wanted to add a few of my own.

1. It's no secret that scheduling software applications can dramatically improve a hospital's staffing situation. However, software won't solve the nursing shortage. It bothers me to say that. I'm a huge believer in technology but sadly, it will not solve all of our problems. Even though the economy has given us the illusion that the shortage of healthcare professionals has decreased, this is only a temporary situation (no pun intended). All analysis suggests the shortage will only continue to get worse. According to the Bureau of Labor, at 23%, the demand for nursing will be much greater than the average for all other occupations between 2006 and 2016. So no matter how efficient the software, if there's no staff to manage - there's no staff - and working with temporary labor is still necessary.
2. Deploying a solution to better manage your internal staff while ignoring the management of staffing agencies won't solve your hospital's staffing problem. Hospitals need a solution that will manage all of their staffing - both permanent and temporary.
3. The article includes some popular generalizations about the use of healthcare agency staff such as: using agency requires more organization and effort and that it "can sometimes lead to resentment among the permanent staff, who question why their hospital is willing to pay twice as much to agency nurses to fill open shifts as it pays to its own loyal staff."

Healthcare Vendor Management Systems ensure that the process for managing agency staff is simple and effective. Implementing such a system means that the same, if not less, effort than managing internal staff is required. In addition, nurses do not get paid 2x as much if they work for an agency. The mark up on pay rates to agency staff does not equate to being 2x the cost of internal staff (especially if you factor in other benefits for internal staff) and this money is not all paid to the nurse. Further, there is an implication in this statement that the mark up is unnecessary. The mark up exists to provide quality staff, often under short notice and goes to cover the business costs of properly recruiting, screening, hiring and placing these professionals.

The solution is to more effectively utilize staffing agencies - not work toward eliminating them. Attempting to eliminate agencies can actually end up being more costly to hospitals in the long run due to increased staff overtime, burnout/turnover and higher management costs due to a lack of efficient processes if/when using agency staff is necessary. Additionally, until the nursing shortage is over it's not feasible for every hospital to fully eliminate their agency usage. Therefore, a better goal is to focus on more effective agency management - not elimination.

In the past I've written about several reasons to use agency staff so I won't repeat myself here. I'll only close by saying that focusing on things such as improved orientation, better credential compliance management and process automation with a comprehensive workforce management system is a more effective solution for hospitals in regard to addressing their concerns with agency staff.

Never A Dull Moment: Clearview Staffing Software Acquired by API Healthcare

Before I left for vacation a few weeks ago I ended the year with a post summarizing some of the more important trends in the healthcare staffing industry for 2009, as well as some of my predictions for 2010. However, proving the industry to be full of surprises, a major event occurred during the last weeks of December that certainly would have made it in to my previous post.

Clearview Staffing Software, the leading provider of web-based staffing applications to healthcare staffing agencies was acquired by API Healthcare, one of the largest providers of web-based staffing applications to hospitals in the nation. This new alliance will certainly prove to be a formidable competitor as they present their comprehensive set of offerings to the industry.

With hospital budgets being minimal and their IT focus on electronic medical records, I imagine that API has had a difficult time selling their applications to hospitals over the last year. So, it's interesting to ponder API's strategy here. Was the acquisition to provide more products to hospitals - those that are fully web-based and present a different pricing model? Was it to enter the staffing agency market? Or is their goal to provide an end-to-end solution to the industry?

Watching what they sell, to whom and under what pricing conditions will be very telling. API will definitely be a company to watch in 2010.

Top Healthcare Staffing Stories of 2009 and Predictions for 2010

Over the next few weeks both of my sons have birthdays and I plan on spending some down time with my family for the holidays. Therefore, this will be my last post until the new year.

I thought I'd use this post to highlight some of the big events that affected the healthcare staffing industry in 2009 as well as make a few predictions about the industry for 2010. (is it 'twenty-ten' or 'two thousand ten'?)

What the healthcare staffing industry looked like in 2009:

Major downturn in spending on healthcare temporary staff.

The biggest news in 2009 for the healthcare staffing industry was undoubtedly about the downturn in the economy. My second blog post ever was on the reasons hospitals were spending less on healthcare agency staff. The down turn in the economy even made people start asking the question: "is there still a nursing shortage?" From there, leading economists confirmed that not only was the economy bad but that it will take awhile for it to improve and return the healthcare staffing industry to pre-2009 levels. And finally, the Staffing Industry Analysts informed us that the nurse travel industry decreased by 44% this year and we saw this downturn reflected in the revenue loss reported by major public healthcare staffing companies.

Widespread adoption of healthcare vendor management.

In 2009 hospitals gave a big vote of confidence to vendor management as the preferred model for agency management. VMS has matured in the industry and delivered on its promise of saving hospitals both time and money on their staffing costs.

How healthcare reform will affect healthcare staffing.

The topic of how healthcare reform will affect healthcare staffing couldn't be avoided. Many debates about the pros and cons of healthcare reform occurred on my blog and many of us had the privilege of hearing former Senator Tom Daschle's view on healthcare reform at the healthcare staffing industry conference. AMN even produced results from a poll suggesting that hospital CEO's feel healthcare reform will benefit the healthcare staffing industry.

Technology VMS companies struggle.

Even though some healthcare vendor management technology companies thrived in 2009 as hospitals increased their adoption of VMS, many companies did not fair so well. A few healthcare VMS technology companies had to close their doors this year while some VMS companies struggled to pay their staffing agency partners. Additionally, some VMS companies found acquisition to be the best way to survive the turbulent year.

Increased use of social media.

2009 was the year that many hospitals and staffing agencies began to use social media. Many hospitals, such as Providence St. Vincents in Portland Oregon who found success with their 'pink glove dance video' that went viral, took full advantage of these tools. Some hospitals are still behind when it comes to social media while several hospitals are finding success with tools such as Twitter. Both healthcare staffing agencies and hospitals are now promoting and monitoring their brands online, as the online tools for brand promotion and management are starting to become more prevalent. I've even created some helpful tools for people to search for healthcare staffing industry information and follow companies in the healthcare staffing industry on Twitter.

As you can see, 2009 was a very eventful year for the healthcare staffing industry. So what will the next year bring?

My predictions for healthcare staffing in 2010:

More consolidation of staffing agencies and VMS companies.

After struggling through the economic downturn of the last 1.5 years many companies are now really feeling the effects. I see several staffing agencies closing their doors and many more acquisitions in 2010. I wouldn't be surprised if we even see some consolidation with some of the major players. In addition, I expect we'll see some more acquisitions of healthcare VMS companies.

Continued adoption of vendor management.

Hospitals will continue to choose vendor management for their agency management solution. As the rate of adoption continues to increase, I expect we'll see hospitals still choose vendor neutral healthcare vendor management companies over agency run managed service providers.

New technology players.

The industry has gotten a bit stale in terms of innovation and new technology options. In addition, we've seen a decent amount of consolidation of industry technology companies. Both of these facts suggest to me that new players will enter the market and hopefully they will bring with them some exciting and innovate technologies. As these players enter the healthcare staffing industry I expect we'll see more and more hospitals and healthcare staffing companies embracing technology to improve their staffing process. Stay tuned!

New marketing methods and opportunities.

As budgets tighten many hospitals and staffing agencies will look for more inexpensive and effective methods for marketing their services. Many more healthcare staffing organizations will turn to SEO/SEM and social media for company/brand promotion. 

The market will come back slowly. Kind of.

Even though there are some positive signs for the economy overall and there has been some slight improvements in the healthcare staffing industry I don't see anything that suggests we should get too excited. Earlier this week the Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) hosted a webinar about the economic outlook for 2010. Their predictions suggested that every industry will improve in 2010 - except healthcare staffing. In fact, they are predicting an overall decline of -1%. Therefore, unfortunately, I believe 2010 will still be a year of struggle. There will be some positive bumps here and there but we won't start fully pulling out of this down turn until early/mid 2011.

What are your predictions for healthcare staffing in 2010? Please share them here if you have any.

I wish you all well - happy holidays - happy new year. See you in 2010!

Healthcare Vendor Management Company - Medefis Acquired by Private Equity Group

Medefis, a technology vendor management provider to the healthcare staffing industry announced that they were acquired this week by a private equity group called Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe.

Medefis was started by three individuals who were former employees of the healthcare staffing agency Aureus in Omaha, Nebraska. Their approach to the market has been to deliver a light weight VMS solution whereby hospitals place open positions online and staffing agencies respond by submitting candidates.

I've watched Medefis for several years and have always thought their model was interesting. I believe it has several pluses and minuses:

The pluses:

• Light weight solution requires little to no training
• Quick process for sign up and adoption
• Low overhead and little maintenance for the application

The minuses:

• Many staffing agencies complain about the model because there are no set rates and they have to bid on each position.
• Staffing agencies are billed directly by Medefis and there are many complications around the billing. For example: Medefis charges the bill rate (x) the number of weeks in the assignment. Call off and cancellation issues cause a lot of confusion when it's time for billing.
• When a hospital uses Medefis it's not the entire hospital. A single unit manager could be using Medefis. This reduces the value to the staffing agencies as well as the hospital and complicates things for everyone by introducing multiple systems.
• The Medefis system lacks several features such as credential screening and compliance. Recently they added time keeping an billing to their application as separate services but it's unclear how this is working. I have yet to find anyone using the features.

It's been an interesting year for healthcare vendor management companies. Some vendor management companies have declared bankruptcy while others have been suffering through major financial issues. It will be interesting to see how this acquisition plays out for Medefis and their model.

You can read the full article on the Medefis acquisition on their web site.

Make Your Nomination for the Staffing Industry Innovator Award

The Staffing Industry Analysts is asking for nominations for the "Staffing Innovator of the Year" award. The award will go to honor a person or company that has contributed a significant innovation toward the positive development of the staffing industry ecosystem.

No doubt you're having a hard time deciding between a certain healthcare staffing blogger or a particular healthcare VMS company that has completely changed how hospitals manage their staffing agencies across the U.S. However, don't forget about the other companies out there also doing there part to innovate this industry:

• Med Staff On-Call - In the very near future Med Staff On-Call's approach to staffing could become the medical staffing industry standard. Their entire recruitment and on-boarding process is done on-line with technology. They also communicate job orders and receive confirmations from their staff in the same way. This process allows them to save their clients money, pay their staff more and keep their overhead low. A truly winning business model.

• Clearview - Clearview makes the best product on the market for managing your business as a staffing agency. There is no second. They also have a suite of other products for nurse competency testing, recruiting, application tracking, online clinical skill checklists and electronic signature documents. They continue to put out new products and grow their already impressive market share.

• TempWorks - TempWorks makes great software for staffing agencies. It's not specific to healthcare so I can't say that I've used it or even seen that much of it. However, following their updates and blog - Staffing Talk - makes it clear that these guys are big innovators in the  staffing industry.

• Amistaff - Amistaff is the parent company of Nurse Testing, eSig Tech and Blue Sky Medical Staffing Software. More healthcare staffing companies use Nurse Testing than any other similar product on the market. Currently, Amistaff is planning on launching a new product called Prophecy in early 2010. This product will incorporate clinical, behavioral and situational assessments with their Nurse Testing product. If it lives up to the hype it could prove to be a game changer for hospitals recruit, screen and hire healthcare staff.

• ShiftHound - The former founders of Bidshift (now Concerro) have started a new company called ShiftHound. ShiftHound delivers a very light weight, yet robust core scheduling tool for hospitals to manage their day to day staffing. ShiftHound is the first of many companies to follow that will challenge incumbent staffing software companies in this space with a more focused, simple and light weight solution. It will be worth watching how they navigate the challenges of the industry. Also, I'm dying to know if these guys left because the new owners of Concerro got their name wrong.

• Medical Solutions - They may appear to be your average size agency doing business as usual. However, their use of social media and having the #1 page rank spot for healthcare staffing blog definitely makes them stand out from the crowd. The information they provide to the industry is valuable and makes them good contenders for industry innovators.

Help promote the industry by participating in this award nomination. Also, be sure and leave a comment if you think there are other companies out there deserving of a nomination.

Alright - get on it. Make your nomination for the staffing industry innovator award. And remember - it's Staffing Robot - with a space between the words. ;-)

Med Staff On-Call's Innovative Approach to Healthcare Staffing

Company: Med Staff On-Call

CEO: Denise A. Kent PhD(c), RN, APN - CEO

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Positioning is one of the hardest challenges facing healthcare staffing agencies. Comparatively, each agency goes through the same/similar processes for recruiting and placing healthcare professionals at hospitals. This makes it difficult for staffing companies to separate themselves from their competition, typically leaving them with only price or volume as their true differentiators.

Recently, however, I discovered a healthcare staffing agency that has a completely different spin on what it means to be a staffing company. Med Staff On-Call is a fully automated staffing agency that uses technology to change the way their business is run. From recruiting, to hiring, to receiving and filling job orders, Med Staff On-Call has found a way to stand out from the pack. The efficiencies created in their innovative model allow them to contain costs, present competitive rates to their clients and provide an overall better work experience for the healthcare professionals they employ.

Med Staff On-Call has three key aspects of their company that make them unique:

Quality - The Intellimatch™ technology process they’ve created drives the quality of the staff they provide by ensuring that the medical professionals they place are the most qualified for every position. This automated matching process improves satisfaction for their employees by factoring in availability, shift and facility preferences, and credentials when notifying staff of available shifts.

Efficiency – Med Staff On-Call’s web-based staffing solution is much more efficient than a traditional staffing agency. The process is completely automated eliminating phone calls, faxes and other manual tasks associated with a traditional staffing process. Instead, staff post their availability on Med Staff On-Call’s secure website and receive notifications of qualifying positions via text message or e-mail. Healthcare organizations are notified instantly of filled positions. In addition, Med Staff On-Call has interfaced their system with leading healthcare vendor management companies so that job orders are made instantly available in their system.

 

Competitive Rates – Med Staff On-Call is 100% driven by innovation, leveraging technology to streamline the staffing process for their hospitals and medical staff. Their technology allows them to lower their internal costs and pass that savings on to their hospital partners. Efficiencies derived from their technology platform allow them to focus on recruiting and retaining quality medical professionals.

Q&A with Med Staff On-Call’s CEO - Denise A. Kent PhD(c), RN, APN

How do healthcare professionals sign up for your service?

“Healthcare professionals sign up for our service on-line. They complete all of the necessary pre-employment requirements and submit their credentials electronically. We then have their credentials verified by a third party. Once the information for the healthcare professional is validated and approved they can access our job orders, add their availability and sign up for specific job alerts.”

How are candidates submitted for jobs?

“Most of our job requisitions come in through on-line portals such as healthcare vendor management systems. These jobs are sent directly to our software application through the interfaces we have built to these VMS systems. If a job matches the preferences and credential qualifications of a healthcare professional they are alerted via text message or email and can respond through the same mediums for the jobs they want. The confirmations are then sent directly to the hospital.”

Why did you decide to run your business this way?

“We never had any intention of being a traditional staffing agency that’s old school. We knew we could create a competitive advantage by delivering higher quality staff, faster and at a lower cost by leveraging technology. Additionally, we wanted to provide healthcare professionals with a better work experience by giving them direct access and more control over their schedules and job preferences. Technology was the logical direction to go in.”

Do you feel that vendor management companies help or hurt your business?

“They definitely help our business. The vendor neutral vendor management companies completely handle the burden of credentialing, billing and job acquisition with our clients. Their systems improve quality by requiring proper documentation and including features like on-line performance evaluations. Overall the efficiency is completely complementary to our model.”

Do hospitals ever have an issue with your model being 100% driven by technology?

“Our clients love how quickly we can meet their staffing requests. We also have a very thorough screening process for our staff. All of their credentials are verified by a third party and all this information is accessible via our system.”

Do you work with other modalities outside of nursing?

“Currently, our primary focus is staffing nurses and nursing assistants. However, we have begun placing allied staff including pharmacy, PT and OT professionals.”

Do you feel your model has helped you in this economy?

“No question it has helped us. Because of our technology we are able to keep our costs low and offer staff at a very competitive rate to our clients. This has made us the number one provider to some of the largest health systems in the country.”

Conclusion: Med Staff On-Call is offering some of the most innovative solutions in the market to both their hospital clients and the heatlhcare professionals they employ. Such innovations will continue to have a positive impact in changing the way business is done in the healthcare staffing industry.

The Healthcare Staffing Technology Search Engine

Today I’m launching another Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) for the healthcare staffing industry titled “Healthcare Staffing Technology Providers Search.” I have complied a list of several companies in the U.S. (as well as a few other relevant sites) that deliver healthcare staffing technology services and included them in this engine. Examples of such technology include hospital scheduling, staff time keeping, applicant tracking, recruitment, healthcare professional testing, agency staff management and healthcare vendor management. I will continue to add sites to the search engine as I become aware of them.

Recently I created the Healthcare Staffing Search engine and the Healthcare Vendor Management Search engine and discussed how these search engines work in more detail in my previous posts.

These search engines will all be located on one page on the Staffing Robot site: Healthcare Staffing Search engines. You can also access them in the top navigation above on this page. Please bookmark the page if you find these tools helpful. I have also embedded the Healthcare Staffing Technology Providers search engine here for you to try out:

Healthcare Staffing Technology Providers Search:

Custom Search

If you provide some form or Healthcare Staffing Technology to the healthcare staffing industry and think your website is not in the list (or you just want to verify) please feel free to email me and I’ll add it.

Related Posts:

The Healthcare Staffing Search Engine

The Healthcare Vendor Management Search Engine