A national healthcare organization operating more than 100 hospitals spent one day examining how it requests, approves and pays for locum tenens coverage. The exercise required no extra spend and produced five recommendations.
Leaders had reason to look. Locum tenens utilization was climbing, approvals were inconsistent across the enterprise and finance had limited visibility into what was being spent or why. Lower-cost staffing alternatives were not always evaluated before a locum request moved forward.
The changes that followed were structural rather than technological: centralized requisition approvals, on-demand financial dashboards, utilization data shared with service line leaders, recruitment teams working from locum utilization reports and predictive analytics applied to coverage gaps.
This case study details each of the five recommendations and the results they generated.
Learnings include:
- How centralized requisition approvals gave leadership real-time visibility into staffing requests
- Why service line accountability and defined performance metrics changed utilization behavior
- How invoice review recovered $1.24 million in a single year without added staff
- Where predictive workforce planning identified coverage needs before utilization escalated