Two recently published reports offer a look at growth metrics — both recent and projected—within the US healthcare staffing industry.
The market for temporary healthcare staffing will grow 5 percent year-over-year in 2014, according to the updated forecast released in September by Staffing Industry Analysts. The slight reduction from our prior forecast of 6 percent growth is due primarily to a weaker-than-anticipated first half for the industry, driven by adverse weather, a fairly mild flu season and lingering uncertainty on the part of healthcare providers about the timing and magnitude of ACA impacts. That last point has been resolved, to some degree, as most for-profit hospital systems announced significant upticks in admissions beginning late in the second quarter, accompanied by a substantial reduction in charity care and associated bad debt expense.
The expansion of insurance coverage will likely continue to act as a tailwind for the US healthcare staffing market over the next few years, as the Congressional Budget Office projects net increases in the number of insured Americans of 12 million in 2014, 7 million in 2015 and 6 million in 2016. Based on this and other positive trends, we anticipate moderate acceleration in the growth rate for the US healthcare staffing industry to 7 percent in 2015, reaching a total market size of $10.9 billion. This would leave the market less than 5 percent below its historical peak of $11.4 billion, reached in 2008.
Among the four sub-segments that comprise healthcare staffing, we estimate that allied health is the largest market, at $2.9 billion in 2014. Our recently released Allied Health and Advanced Practice Benchmarking Report offers firms that provide temporary staffing of therapists, sonographers, medical technologists, pharmacists and other allied health professionals a range of valuable financial and operational data points that can be used for benchmarking and strategic planning.
Comparing data from the first half of 2014 to the first half of 2013, the survey results indicate that allied health staffing revenue fell 6 percent, as a 2 percent improvement in the average bill rate was not enough to offset an 8 percent decrease in hours billed. Robust growth was reported in respiratory and speech therapy staffing, while assistants in both occupational and physical therapy disciplines saw heavy declines.
This survey also collected information on staffing of advanced practitioners, which we categorize as a component of the locum tenens, or physician staffing, sub-segment. Nurse practitioners constituted the largest percentage of advanced practitioner revenue in the survey (45 percent of total), while also exhibiting stronger year-over-year growth in revenue and hours billed than either of the other two advanced practitioner occupations, physician assistants and certified registered nurse anesthetists.
Though the full report is available only to firms that submit a completed survey, corporate members may access a summary report which presents a subset of the findings from the complete survey analysis.
