When hospitals, clinics, doctor’s offices, and other healthcare facilities are short doctors, nurse practitioners (NPs), physician assistants (PAs), and dentists, they often turn to locum tenens providers for help filling in the gaps. Healthcare facilities can directly hire these temporary health professionals for short- or long-term assignments themselves—or work with a managed service provider (MSP) to post their jobs online—but there is a third, more collaborative method facilities can leverage that is proven to yield positive results for patients.
At Barton Associates, we aim to build meaningful one-on-one relationships with healthcare facilities across the United States, partnering with them directly to recruit and staff skilled locum tenens providers within their walls. In this blog, we’re diving deep into why you should choose Barton Associates for locum tenens staffing over MSPs, so that you can focus on what matters most: providing high-quality care for patients.
What is a managed service provider (MSP)?
In the healthcare staffing industry, managed service providers (MSPs) are third-party companies that aggregate jobs from multiple staffing agencies and fully manage the entire staffing process from start to finish. Essentially, MSPs are the middleman between healthcare facilities and staffing agencies.
While MSPs can be useful for fulfilling large shortages that impact services, the staffing agencies that supply the medical providers do not actually work one-on-one with facilities. Delays in staffing, and, at times, the placement of skilled providers that don’t quite fit the facility’s needs can lead to further issues. Since the MSP aggregates the staffing companies, and handles most of the other day-to-day tasks, the MSP is the contact for the facility.
This shortfall is easily remedied by partnering directly with a locum tenens staffing agency like Barton Associates who will work hand-in-hand with hiring managers to find providers with the skill, experience, and education patients deserve.
How is Barton Associates different from a MSP?
The main difference between Barton Associates and a MSP all comes down to relationship building. When a healthcare facility partners with Barton for locum tenens providers, the facility is assigned a single account executive who acts as a point of contact for all its questions—a unique benefit that allows Barton to gain a comprehensive and actionable understanding of the facility’s deepest staffing needs. This also opens a line of communication between Barton and a facility that makes it easy for Barton to adapt to changing staffing demands, whether that be because of shifting patient volumes or new shortages. Barton Associates also handles credentialing, licensing, and travel for locum tenens providers, a benefit that MSPs often do not perform in-house.
In contrast, MSPs are built around multiple staffing agencies using its platform to fill the needs of their clients. This means that a facility utilizing a MSP has access to locums from multiple agencies at once but does not have the direct line of communication to the agency staffing their facility, leading to a loss of the personal touch that makes Barton unique.
Why partner with Barton Associates for locum tenens providers?
We’ve talked about the main difference between Barton Associates and MSPs, but outside of Barton’s one-on-one relationship building, there are a few other reasons why a facility should work with Barton over the competition:
Access to a Talented Pool of Providers
Over the 20+ years we’ve been in business, we’ve built a vast network of physicians, NPs, PAs, and dentists who are willing to travel for work. Each of these providers come from different specialties, so facilities who work with us have their pick of the crop for staff.
Having to go through each individual applicant is a long and tedious process for any hiring team. Our recruiters have detailed profiles and information for each of our locum tenens providers, ensuring that whatever position they are offered, they are qualified for and interested in it. Barton first discusses goals and needs with a facility, then scours its network to find the best fits—meaning positions are filled quickly with the best candidate for the job.
Lower Aggregate Costs
Working with Barton Associates provides healthcare facilities with many different avenues for reducing aggregate costs. First, facilities that partner with Barton Associates over MSPs cut out the middleman, reducing or completely eliminating hidden fees and costs associated with working with job aggregators. State licensure, travel assistance, and other services can also come with fees and hidden costs that MSPs may place on facilities. Barton Associates offers contracts with our clients that outline all fees. The administrative fees include recruiting, staffing, travel, and credentialing which are factored into the overall cost.
Malpractice Insurance Coverage
Barton Associates offers free malpractice insurance to all our locum tenens providers, such as physicians, nurse practitioners (NPs), physician assistants (PAs), and dentists. By providing free malpractice insurance, facilities do not have to worry about added costs when taking on our locum tenens providers.
Barton utilizes an “A”-rated insurance company for our policies. They can carry up to $1,000,000 per claim and $3,000,000 aggregate. We can also enroll our providers in patient compensation funds for various states. Check out our standard terms and conditions to learn more about our malpractice insurance policies.
Adapting to Changing Processes
Barton is quick to adapt to new policies or regulations set forth by facilities and state law.
Take the shift toward digital and electronic record keeping, for example: more and more, healthcare professionals are required to have an electronic record of their fingerprints. Our recruiters and credentialing team works tirelessly to help our providers gain the proper documentation to satisfy fingerprinting requirements.
Barton Associates is in constant contact with each of their client facilities, meaning that we are always up to date on the latest developments and changes to the staffing industry. This includes changes to credentialing such as live scan fingerprinting. MSPs are not consistently in contact with facilities, if at all, so any changes to licensure or security may create issues or discrepancies in the staffing process.
Pitfalls of Managed Service Providers (MSPs)
Now that we’ve talked about some of the benefits of working with Barton, what are some of the issues facilities face when working with MSPs? Here are some major considerations for those looking for a staffing agency to work with:
Misunderstanding of Requirements
In healthcare staffing, communication is crucial for the success of both the staffing agency and the facility it is working with. Using an aggregator such as a MSP can make it hard for facilities to find the exact type of staff they need.
A similar comparison is using an aggregator like Booking.com vs going straight to Hilton.com. When a user, in this case, the facility, uses Booking.com, they are able to see all the hotels (the agencies), who are looking to fill the needs of the user (the facility). Booking.com will give you more options, but may not have the same filters as the Hilton.com website. When you work directly with Hilton, you are building a relationship with them directly, so they are able to help you more effectively if anything goes wrong. MSPs (Booking.com) serve a valuable purpose, giving facilities access to more providers (hotels), but the relationship and connection is missing.
Loss of Staffing Control
The staffing process can be a time-consuming burden for facilities. Working with a MSP that struggles with communication can create a disconnect between the facility and the hiring process. In many cases MSPs use a hands-off approach when it comes to staffing facilities, automating much of the process in order to staff large projects fast. This can lead to a disconnect between the user and platform.
Extra Fees
As the middleman, MSPs charge agencies to have their jobs available on their sites or platforms, which often trickle down to the facilities themselves. Using MSPs for multiple positions and job openings can greatly increase the costs of staffing, especially if there is a large shortage of staff at these locations.
Get Started with Barton
While each facility’s needs vary, Barton Associates offers a unique approach to locum tenens staffing, building relationships with clients for 20+ years. Our team dedicates themselves to making the hiring process as efficient as possible for both the facility and the provider.
If your healthcare organization is looking to fill gaps in coverage with one, two, or dozens of locum tenens providers, reach out to our team to set up a call. For providers looking for their next locum tenens assignment, check out our job board to see our current job openings.
