Healthcare MSP: Benefits and Importance

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Cloudticity, L.L.C.

From intense nurse shortages to out-of-control labor costs, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare all the inadequacies and failures in the healthcare industry.

The pandemic gave rise to the healthcare MSP (Managed Service Provider) and VMS (Vendor Management Systems) models.

Prior to healthcare MSPs, hospitals and clinics were responsible for managing dozens of contracts for healthcare workers and suppliers, each with their own rates, quality assurance, billing systems, and various other processes.

It is now estimated that 71% of healthcare facilities utilize a VMS or MSP to help them manage their external workforce. 51% of these are MSPs.

What is the Managed Service Provider model?

The MSP model streamlines workforce-related services, such as payroll services, workforce management, resource planning, supply change management, regulatory compliance, and other services used by provider organizations and facilities. The goal is to ensure the availability of the clinical staff, as well as handle any contingent labor staffing challenges. Think of an MSP as an external human relations department.

Pros of MSPs

While there are many benefits to engaging an MSP to help your company tackle its most vexing problems and critical services, we will only focus on the five most important pros: necessity, cost, friction, quality, and control.

Necessity

Companies that utilize an MSP are able to offload a large amount of the work that comes with managing specialized contingent and temporary workforces.

Cost

Healthcare facilities, like any other service, must pay a premium for utilizing an MSP. This cost can be translated through a bill rate percentage, or directly to the facility. This offloads the expense a facility would otherwise incur to recruit and engage highly qualified candidates.

Friction

Whenever more steps and/or people are added to a process, things can slow down. Profiles are passed to managers tasked with making decisions who then must relay that data to account managers who must, in turn, communicate with staffing agencies. This often leads to a frustrating, seemingly never-ending game of 'phone-tag.' Healthcare facilities that implement an MSP are saved from the friction and hassle of this unnecessary step.

Quality

Healthcare facilities that utilize an MSP, must rely on them for both quality and speed. They sleep secure in the knowledge that candidates won't reach the hiring manager unless they have been vetted and deemed qualified and trustworthy. The MSPs often have pre-existing relationships with these candidates, serving only to further enhance the quality process.

Control

Often, MSPs are tasked to be the decision-maker in terms of what vendors to contract with, the onboarding process, how the workforce tracks their time, and what the hiring process entails. This frees the facility from the hassle of these tasks. The MSP implements these tasks using proven best practices. They are, after all, the pros.

How Does MSP in Healthcare Help Drive Workforce Efficiency?

In addition to optimizing all of the complex tasks associated with contingency staffing and workforce management, healthcare MSPs help their client facilities run more efficiently and save them money. But there are even more advantages that MSPs provide to further enhance workforce efficiency.

  • Business Intelligence - The healthcare MSP regularly provides you insights that provide the metrics that matter the most. By pointing out these key performance trends, the MSP helps you continually improve and better plan for the future.
  • Efficiency through Automation - The healthcare MSP often provides a one-stop-shop that automates time-intensive tasks faced by healthcare facilities such as contract management, timesheet completion and approval, assignment extension, and a host of other related tasks. This resource automation leads to substantial cost savings.
  • Simplified Recruiting and Outsourcing - a reliable healthcare MSP ensures you have ready access to the staff you require with their global pool of clinical workers, providing you an easy-to-manage source for all your workforce needs, including temporary and travel nurses.
  • Regulatory Compliance - Healthcare MSPs ensure that your technology, security measures, and processes are current and adhere to regulatory requirements, such as HIPAA. This ensures you are well prepared for any audits, saving you from potential penalties, fines, and downtime.
  • Employee Engagement and Retention - Your facility's workforce efficiency is improved across the board by the healthcare MSPs' ability and efforts to ensure a reliable, easily managed reservoir of qualified temporary workers.

Keep in mind, also, that a reliable, quality healthcare MSP partner will customize its approach to best align with your facility's initiatives and strategic needs.

FAQs

What is a Healthcare MSP?

A healthcare MSP is your partner in helping your facility save costs, improve processes, and enhance quality by implementing, automating, and managing tasks that hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities once had to manage themselves. This allows the facility to better focus on providing patients with quality care and treatment.

Types of Healthcare MSPs

While there are a number of types of healthcare MSPs, for our purposes, however, we are only  going to focus on just two of them – healthcare workforce MSP and healthcare IT MSP. Please bear in mind that the sole purpose of all MSPs, healthcare, or otherwise, is to reduce business management complexities and free up resources internally by outsourcing management operations to experts that already have infrastructure and processes built out.

Healthcare Workforce MSP

Healthcare workforce MSPs handle recruitment and development lifecycle from cradle to grave. They increase efficiency and reduce costs by optimizing both clinical and nonclinical contingent and core talent.

Healthcare IT MSP

The healthcare IT MSP is a managed solution where your healthcare IT infrastructure is handled by the MSP, freeing you from infrastructure management and IT staffing operations. This is where Cloudticity comes in. Our managed cloud solution manages your operations, security, and compliance operations. One key feature of the Cloudticity Oxygen™ platform is that it maps controls to the HIPAA and HITRUST frameworks, enabling you to easily monitor and maintain compliance of the environment.

Why is MSP So Important?

The healthcare MSP is vital to your organization as it automates and offloads much of the time-consuming, labor-intensive, mundane tasks and frees up both your human resources and administrative staff. The added benefit of ensuring regulatory compliance can't be over-extended, either.

Driven by the expansion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), an aging population, and clinicians and nursing shortages, there will be no slowdown in the healthcare MSP boom for the next decade. It is the go-to solution for contingent labor staff challenges. In fact, according to  Market Data Forecast, the global healthcare workforce management systems market is forecasted to be worth $2.64 billion by the year 2027, growing at a CAGR of 13.6% from 2022 to 2027.

What is a cloud MSP?

Managed cloud providers, or cloud MSPs, take on the heavy lifting of managing cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, or other IT environments for healthcare companies. A healthcare cloud MSP like Cloudticity can help your healthcare organization maintain operational efficiency and security profiles in your cloud environment. Like a healthcare MSP used for staffing, as discussed in this article, a healthcare cloud MSP can help you augment gaps in IT staff in order to reduce the work needed and complexities of maintaining IT environments.

Want to learn more about how a healthcare cloud MSP can improve your business? Schedule a free consultation with a healthcare cloud expert today.

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