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All Healthcare Staffing Firms Should Work Together to Embrace Best Practices With MSPs

Staffing Stream

All Healthcare Staffing Firms Should Work Together to Embrace Best Practices With MSPs

June 13, 2013
Global healthcare concept

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As president of workforce solutions for AMN Healthcare, I take exception with Colleen Mills’ recent blog post, Why Small Healthcare Staffing Firms Should Take a Stand on VMS/MSP. A well-run MSP model bases its value on metrics, such as fill rates, and depends on the success of its affiliate vendors. Many staffing firms have long standing relationships with their MSP partners that have resulted in greater growth and profitability.

Over the past 30 years, businesses in every major sector around the world have embraced flexible work force solutions to create greater degrees of efficiency for our clients. We can neither sit on the sidelines and let our clients dictate how these programs work nor can we simply wish these programs away.

As this year’s chairman of the American Staffing Association, one of the planks of my platform is to develop best practices with respect to staffing firm and MSP/VMS relationships. Such best practices will provide win-win solutions for staffing firms, clients, MSPs/VMSs, and assigned employees. Staffing firms of all sizes have come together to form a task force and will have invested hundreds of hours collectively to develop tools to help influence the client contracting process and on-going operations of MSP and VMS relationships with their affiliate vendors. We expect to deliver on this initiative in the next couple of months.

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I strongly urge all staffing firms - healthcare or otherwise - that are not already members of ASA to join the association and become part of the process to make client service even better. Better client service will benefit MSPs/VMSs, healthcare staffing firms, and, most important, our dual clients: healthcare facilities and healthcare professionals.

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