Enhancing Compliance and Quality Control

The right VMS offers many powerful features. You need a platform with built-in compliance features for credential verification, background checks, and license tracking. The system must be able to automatically force compliance to avoid potential short-term and long-term conflicts.

For longer-term assignments, for example, you must ensure long-term compliance. You can’t place someone whose credentials will expire before the end of the assignment. A VMS should enable you to force compliance when sorting candidates and automate notifications when certifications are set to expire to avoid compliance violations.

Compliance in healthcare is paramount. It is not only a legal obligation but also an ethical one. Failing to provide qualified, credentialed staff can lead to significant liability exposure and impact the duty of care.

Quality Control

Beyond compliance, you also need an easy way to track performance. The best workers will have the qualifications and fit an organization’s culture. You need an easy way to assess performance to evaluate that fit. If a hospital department isn’t happy with a placement, you need to know that to avoid placing the same person there again. At the same time, you want to know when things go well to make it easier for additional placements.

When you find the right fit, you can reduce screenings and compliance. The information will already be in the system. With good reviews in the system, you can quickly hire the same person back.

Performance Tracking

The best VMS solutions will also allow you to track changes in performance over time. The staff shortage and increasing demand for high-stress jobs are taking a toll on healthcare workers. A 2024 study by Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) noted a staggering 46% of healthcare workers report they are clinically depressed. This can lead to degraded performance, so you need a way to regularly evaluate and rank candidates to ensure quality placements.

You can also track quality if you manage multiple staffing agencies in your VMS. This allows you to create a tiered system when filling shifts. You might automate the process so that your top-performing agencies get openings first. If they cannot fill a shift after a certain period, you can then send it on to your next best choices, and so on, until the shift is filled.

The cumulative effect of these features is a dramatic reduction in time-to-fill vacancies. In healthcare, this isn't just a metric; it's a measure of patient care quality. Every day a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) bed is understaffed or an oncology unit lacks a specialized infusion nurse, patient care suffers. And, when you are juggling multiple positions, candidates, agencies, and healthcare providers, you must be able to automate such functions to work efficiently — especially if you are looking to maintain staffing levels or grow your MSP business.

Back to Top

Healthcare Staffing Efficiency & Cost Savings 

A recent industry survey by Experian Health shows that staffing shortages seriously impact medical staffing. Challenges with payer reimbursements, patient collections, and high error rates have all accelerated — exacerbated by staffing shortages in the professional ranks. These shortages are also noted to lead to a decline in patient care, with the survey revealing that:

"...staffing shortages significantly affect reimbursement workflows to the detriment of patients and healthcare employees."

With a VMS, staffing agencies and MSPs can access a larger pool of healthcare professionals. This helps to fill spots more quickly, reducing the administrative costs of sourcing, contacting, and placing qualified professionals. An automated workflow creates efficiencies that produce actual bottom-line savings through:

• Automated workforce efficiency: A VMS streamlines manual tasks like candidate sourcing, resume screening, and timesheet processing, freeing staff to focus on strategic, value-added activities that boost satisfaction and fill rates.
• Real-time cost visibility: By providing instant insights into workforce data—rates, expenses, and hours worked—a VMS allows organizations to proactively manage costs, reduce overtime, and identify areas for budget optimization.
• Proactive compliance management: VMS automates credential tracking, sends expiration alerts, and maintains audit trails, helping agencies and MSPs avoid costly non-compliance penalties and safeguard their reputation in the healthcare sector.
• Data-driven performance optimization: Analytics on KPIs like fill rates and vendor performance empower users to make better decisions and continue to streamline processes.

For example, the best VMS solution will automate timekeeping and billing in several specific ways, such as:

• Mobile-friendly time capture: Allowing healthcare professionals to clock in and out directly from their smartphones. This real-time data capture eliminates the need for manual timesheets, reducing errors and time theft. 
• Geofencing for accuracy: Using geofencing technology ensures that workers can only clock in when they're physically at the assigned healthcare facility. This prevents time fraud and ensures accurate billing for actual hours worked. 
• Integration with facility EMR/EHR: Integrating with the healthcare facility's Electronic Medical Records (EMR) or Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems. This means when a nurse logs patient care tasks, it automatically validates their timesheet, ensuring billing accuracy and justifying staffing levels. 
• Automated shift rules enforcement: Pre-configuring shift rules based on job classifications, facility policies, and labor laws. For example, a good VMS should be able to prevent a nurse from being scheduled for back-to-back 12-hour shifts or flag when an assignment might push a worker into unapproved overtime.
  
  

Payroll Accuracy

A VMS designed for the healthcare industry also enhances payroll accuracy. For example, Bridge VMS automates complex rate calculations, accounting for variables like job classification, shift type, experience level, and even unit-specific rates (ICU vs. ER). This significantly eliminates manual errors and payroll mistakes. The system also flags discrepancies before processing, such as timesheets exceeding legal work hour limits, and prompts workers to provide role-specific documentation (like patient acuity levels) during time entry, ensuring both accuracy and compliance with healthcare billing regulations.

Features like consolidated invoicing, which itemizes costs by facility, role, and shift for easy auditing, drastically reduce the administrative burden. Approved timesheets are automatically fed into payroll systems, eliminating manual data entry errors and speeding up the payroll process—a crucial benefit in an industry where workers often juggle multiple agency assignments.

For MSPs already operating on thin margins, these efficiencies can lead to significant improvements in profitability.

Improving Vendor Management

Managing vendor relationships is another challenge, especially if you are relying on multiple suppliers for workers. A VMS creates a centralized platform to manage vendor relationships and ratings. 

Vendor Tiering

A VMS with a vendor tiering feature allows you to use healthcare system ratings to rate and value your options based on such things as performance and specialties. You should also be able to track response times and fill rates for urgent roles. So, when a Level 1 trauma center needs an experienced ER nurse overnight, your system can automatically prioritize vendors that have a proven track record with high-stakes placements.

A good VMS solution should also provide you with insights that balance rates with reliability. A particular vendor or candidate may have slightly higher rates, but has fewer shift rejections or missed shifts, creating a more cost-effective solution in the long run.

Vendor Feedback

In managing vendors, there should be a way to provide feedback, which is valuable data to help improve quality. If a given agency's nurses receive lower quality ratings in particular areas, such as charting accuracy, you can alert the agency, enabling them to implement strategies to improve quality. This collaboration enhances the quality of care and builds stronger relationships.

VMS Case Study: Navigating Contingent Workforce Challenges

Here is another real-world VMS application.

Eden Brown Synergy is a well-established staffing firm with a network of offices across the UK. With increasing demand, tracking and managing contingent staff and third-party suppliers under short turnaround times significantly strained internal resources. Executives feared potential problems in meeting client demands with the high quality of service that had made them successful.

Bridge VMS solved their contingent workforce concerns with a highly configurable VMS solution that was up and running in minutes. A centralized solution to manage client requests meant no more missed assignments or delays in filling slots. The ability to manage all third-party suppliers and share pools of workers with different companies enabled Eden Brown to streamline workflow and optimize operations.

Effective Shift Management

Healthy staffing is a constantly moving target. Health analytics company Elsevier’s Clinician of the Future Report showed that about half of clinicians in the US, Canada, and the UK plan to leave their jobs in the next few years. This means constant churn among contingent hires and new candidates entering the pool.

Shift management becomes even more challenging without a streamlined system to handle this evolving flow. You need real-time visibility into staff availability and shift scheduling to work efficiently. With configurable rules and qualification checks, you also need advanced features like shift swapping and shift bidding for staff control and flexibility.

Real-time visibility into staff availability and shift scheduling enables automated conflict checking to prevent double-booking or overtime violations and notifications for quick-fill requests or last-minute callouts.

Back To Top

How to Utilize a VMS 

Successful Healthcare Staffing with a Competitive Edge 

Staffing agencies, MSPs, and healthcare organizations can utilize a VMS to elevate customer service, improve the quality of care, and optimize resources by employing a few best practices, such as:

• Enhancing Service Quality and Efficiency: Utilize VMS features like skill-based matching algorithms and real-time availability tracking to place the right healthcare professionals in the right roles quickly. This speeds up placements and ensures that each professional's skills align precisely with needs.
• Maximizing Quality of Care: Leverage VMS data analytics to identify staffing patterns and patient acuity levels. Using this insight to staff high-demand units or specialties proactively reduces the strain on existing staff and minimizes the use of overtime or last-minute placements.
• Continuous Improvement and Feedback Loops: Implement post-assignment surveys for both healthcare workers and facilities through the VMS. Analyze this feedback to understand strengths, pinpoint areas for improvement, and continuously refine your staffing strategies.
• Regular Reviews and Evaluations: Schedule regular reviews to analyze key VMS metrics such as time-to-fill, compliance rates, and cost savings. Compare these against industry benchmarks and your historical data to ensure your VMS delivers optimal value and guides any system refinements.
• Engaging Staff and Healthcare Managers: Foster VMS adoption by involving end-users in customization. Not all VMS solutions can adapt to your workflow, however, so make sure you choose a customizable system.
• Making the Most Out of Automation: Embrace VMS automation for tasks like credential tracking, shift scheduling, and timesheet approval. This frees your team from administrative burdens, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives.

Choosing the Best VMS Solution

When evaluating potential solutions, consider the following key considerations to help overcome some of the key challenges in recruitment and operations.

Ease of Use

If a system is difficult to use, adoption will suffer. You want a VMS with a deep set of tools that makes it easy to use. In today’s workflow, your solution must be cloud-based for mobile accessibility with real-time updates.

Workflow and Integration

While there are several VMS options on the market, you need a solution that is tailored to meet the unique demands of the healthcare industry. Not all systems can adapt to your way of doing business, so make sure that any VMS considered enables your preferred workflow and integrates with your systems.

Experience

You want to work with a provider that can help you overcome common challenges in implementing new solutions, such as data integration, data migration, and customization. Data migration is crucial for maintaining data integrity and minimizing disruptions during transition.

The best providers will walk you through implementation or handle it for you.

Training and Support

Comprehensive training is key to successful adoption and overcoming resistance to change. You need a solution that will provide ongoing support to maximize the benefits of your VMS.

Transform Your Healthcare Staffing 

The right VMS solution can transform your healthcare staffing, resulting in better staffing practices and increased client satisfaction. Selecting the right platform will help you fill slots more quickly and reduce the administrative burden for everyone, from workers to agencies to healthcare organizations, allowing a greater focus on the quality of patient care.

Managing a healthcare workforce and maintaining qualified staffing levels will continue to be challenging. However, with a strong VMS solution, you can optimize your approach and scale your capacity.

Bridge VMS can help. We provide cutting-edge VMS solutions coupled with unparalleled expertise to help MSPs and staffing companies run contingent staffing programs and offer the same services as much larger organizations.

We welcome you to contact our team and book a call to discuss your needs.