Why Alternatives to Hospital Staffing Agencies Are on the Rise – Part II

This is Part II of our article on the rise in alternatives to hospital staffing agencies. You will find Part I here. 

Why Hospital Staffing Agencies’ Financial Woes Are a Problem

The myriad of hospital staffing agencies that seemed to pop up like mushrooms after an autumn rainstorm in the wake of COVID are now beginning to drop off. Why is this a problem for hospital leadership? Well, relying upon outside agencies for mission-critical staff wasn’t an ideal solution to begin with. It met a need at a difficult time, sure enough, but it also contributed to extra expense, and hospital CEOs simply were not seeing the return on their substantial investment. 

Add to that the fact that many of these agencies are now struggling under the weight of their own debt and you can be all but certain that the quality of service is beginning to suffer. How confident can you be in a hospital staffing agency that cannot balance its own ledger and keep its house in order? What if the agency you depend on to keep you staffed with a sufficient number of hospitalists declares Chapter 11 and begins layoffs? How will that affect your relationship with them? How will it affect your physician’s morale? 

Bad News, Good News

Let’s face facts, third-party hospital staffing agencies were always an imperfect solution at best. They aren’t the ideal way to ensure you keep key hospitalist and other physician positions filled. These agencies raise your expenditures on staffing at a most inopportune time and introduce extra bureaucracy and complexity. Most hospital leaders would tell you that they introduce as many problems as they solve, if not more. 

The staffing challenges facing hospital chiefs of staff and CEOs are not likely to subside anytime soon. Baby Boomers are still raising the demand for hospital services. Healthcare costs are still not in check. Health insurance companies are still a bear we have to wrestle with. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we have a superior alternative to hospital staffing agencies. Given that workforce challenges like staffing shortages were at the top of the list of hospital CEOs concerns in the ACHEs annual survey, that is very good news indeed. 

A More Organic Alternative to Hospital Staffing Agencies

In our view, what was needed was a more streamlined way to connect doctors and hospitals. A system that leaves hospitals unencumbered by complicated contracts and does not stand in the way of the critical physician-hospital relationship. The way we see it, the physicians are strategic partners with the hospital. They should be incentivized to participate in hospital programs to improve quality of care, documentation, and throughput. So we created a model to facilitate the change we wanted to see.

 Open Source M.D. brings doctors and hospitals together to form mutually beneficial long-term relationships. We believe that’s better for everyone involved. It leads to a hospital that runs more smoothly, with physicians that have healthy morale and feel invested and part of the hospital where they work. More efficient and smooth-running hospitals and happier physicians and administrators inevitably lead to a higher quality of care for patients. In our book, that’s as close to a win-win scenario as it gets. 

Open Source MD’s innovative approach to hospital staffing means:

• NO recruitment, locums, or human resources overhead for the hospital.
• Hospitals pay doctors directly and retain control over their services.
• Hospitals have the power to adjust their physician workforce size as needed.
• Closer physician-hospital relationships, free of third-party agency interference.
• Long-term solutions for chronic staffing shortages rather than “band-aids”. 

Practical Solutions to Hospital Staffing Challenges

Open Source M.D. was founded by physicians who recognized an urgent need for a better hospital staffing solution. Ensuring you have experienced hospitalists and other physicians on staff who know your hospital and feel like a part of it is essential to meeting the highest standards for quality of care. 

The Open Source MD model connects physicians to hospitals so they can build lasting relationships as partners. Unlike commercial hospital staffing agencies, we facilitate doctor-hospital relationships rather than acting as an obstacle to them.  

Please call us at 336-997-9840 or contact us online to learn more.