Don’t you just love acronyms? An acronym may make it easier to communicate by reducing long terms to just a few letters, but it does you no good if you don’t know what it stands for. Such is the case with ‘MSP’ and ‘VMS’ in the healthcare staffing arena. If you do not know what they mean, you are not alone.
‘MSP’ stands for ‘managed service provider’. The MSP existed long before being integrated into healthcare staffing. Now that it is part of the healthcare industry, it’s important that staffing agencies and healthcare facilities understand what it is. As for ‘VMS’, this stands for ‘vendor management system’. A VMS can operate independently or as part of an MSP program.
MSP Programs for Healthcare
The first thing to understand is that MSPs are more programs and strategies than anything else. An MSP program can be the foundation of a company that specializes in a single service. It can also be a program operated by a service provider offering a variety of different services.
A good example here is Vista Select, an MSP program operated by the Vista staffing agency. Vista Select is just one of many services they provide. It is a service intended to streamline the management of temporary staffing and it covers all sorts of clinicians including doctors, nurses, CRNA’s, etc.
The main purpose of the MSP is to act as an intermediary between staffing provider and hiring facility. For purposes of illustration, imagine a staffing agency on one end and a hospital on the other. The MSP program sits between the two. It acts as a common point of collaboration and a means for managing the one thing both organizations have in common: clinicians looking for work.
Vendor Management Systems for Healthcare
Moving on to vendor management systems, these are computer systems for managing an organization’s relationships with its vendors. For our purposes, the organization is the healthcare facility. The vendor is the locum tenens provider looking for work.
A VMS helps the healthcare facility manage all of its locum tenens providers. It accounts for scheduling, open shifts, billing rates, licensing and credentialing, and more. All of the data necessary to manage a set of relationships is contained in one central location, usually in a cloud environment.
As you might imagine, an MSP program often makes use of a VMS. Combining the two just makes it easier to manage comprehensive staffing solutions. And when you are talking about a major healthcare facility, like a big city hospital, you need all the tools you can get to keep track of so much temporary staffing.
Real-Time Collaboration in the Cloud
An MSP program brings a lot of value to the table all by itself. So does a VMS. The key to bringing them together for maximum benefit is to do it all in the cloud. When everyone involved works in the cloud, you end up with real-time collaboration that makes for more efficient work.
Managing things in the cloud gives everyone at the staffing agency instant access to the data they need to fill open positions. It gives hospital administrators instant access to the data they need to make sure staffing holes are filled. Everyone involved can customize a dashboard giving them a snapshot view of whatever data is most important to them. The end result is a system that works like a well-oiled machine.
Now you know the difference between an MSP and a VMS in the healthcare staffing arena. Needless to say that both have revolutionized how staffing agencies and healthcare facilities meet staffing needs.
