In the first blog of this series, “What Every Healthcare CFO Should Know in 2023”, we discussed current CFO concerns about the impact of some medical professionals leaving the hospital workforce. Fewer workers in the healthcare labor force translates to higher costs for healthcare providers. Hospital labor costs soared by almost 40 percent between 2019 and early 2022. In the coming two years, clinical labor costs alone could increase an additional 10 percent. This challenge is not going away and is something finance leaders will have to navigate throughout 2023.

Responding to Staff Shortages

In response to staff losses, hospitals are struggling to locate replacement workers in much the same way as some other industries that are being challenged by staff turnover. This is not just a current phenomenon, or a result of recent inflation – this is a situation that started at least several years ago and shows no signs of abating.

To meet these immediate needs, like other industries that require staffing to operate, hospitals of all sizes are turning to temporary and contract staffing services to fill these vacancies – at least for the short run. Unfortunately, these actions only exacerbate the financial pressures and management challenges because hiring temporary staff to address these resource shortages not only adds additional costs (temporary staff costs can be three times higher than standard full-time employees) but also creates additional, unnecessary risks for security/access violations.

Moreover, temporary staff/contractors often have assignments working or serving in multiple healthcare facilities in the same timeframe. If this is the case, then workers may have to travel from one campus to others, possibly carrying multiple badges and/or access codes and keys (even if they are working for the same healthcare organization). These are all required to grant them the various types of access they need to work in each facility they are traveling to. To ensure the correct access rights, and to ensure those rights are not violated, hospitals and medical facilities need to assign additional on-site resources, including security teams, who will verify the correct access.

Strategic Contractor Management

Organizations can improve their management of contracted workers several ways – and in the process, improve their operational safety and security. Here are some ideal requirements for the strategic management of contracted workers:

• Implement an automated process for on- and off-boarding contingent workers, including setting access permissions for all locations and timing, badging, and credentialing
• Create and implement a secure, web-based badge application process to collect all pre-requisites (training confirmations, identity documents, background checks, etc.) that are needed to confirm work assignment eligibility and security checks related to contract workers
• Implement an automated badge application review and approval process
• Implement an automatic termination of physical access immediately upon expiration of pre-requisite criteria for all locations
• Assign delegated administration to the worker’s company to comply with the hospital’s processes, increasing accountability and saving time and money for hospital administration
• Ensure the management systems can support easy badge and company access audits for real-time compliance as well as manage and reducing risk

Implementing these requirements will go a long way toward efficient and secure management of contractor access. On the one hand, this list is rather daunting – the complexity of the programming and system design, coupled with all the necessary integrations to be sure that important factors are covered, is very high. Few companies have the resources to develop and implement these systems, particularly in parallel with the higher staffing costs they are designed to help with!

On the other hand, such a development is not necessary at all – instead, just contact Vector Flow.

Vector Flow PIAM is the Healthcare Contractor Management Solution

Vector Flow PIAM for Healthcare provides a fully automated solution to manage contractor identities and physical access to mitigate risks and eliminate error-prone manual processes. This system is ideal for managing contractors and can be extended to manage all staff identities if desired.

Vector Flow‘s PIAM for Healthcare leverages the power of data from your healthcare organization’s existing Human Resources (HR), Physical Access Control Systems (PACS) and other security systems to make intelligent identity authentication and access provisioning decisions more quickly and with dramatically improved operational and cost efficiencies. A next-generation PIAM solution, Vector Flow automates physical security workflows across the enterprise by providing real-time visibility of all relevant access data, and data-driven recommendations to predict and recommend physical access rights with full transparency and explanations.