Streamlining Medical Staffing Processes: 8 Key Use Cases

Many medical staffing agencies today are burdened by complex document collection requirements when registering doctors, nurses, and agency workers. Doctors and nurses are on the phone with the staffing agencies while in the hospitals and don't have the ability to organize their documentation (in paper form). Given that agencies typically staff large numbers of medical personnel, each of whom is required to submit significant documentation in order to get placed, time is of the essence. Hospitals and clinics require qualified doctors to fill in vacancies quickly. Unfortunately, this qualification and placement process is often prolonged due to heavy paperwork and phone calls. This hurts the qualification and placement rate, and damages the efficiency and efficacy of the process. But there’s a better way. Digital staff onboarding allows agencies to collect all forms and documents in a single digital session. Medical personnel get qualified quickly, helping agencies save precious time and make the most of their human capital faster.

The Dangers of Prolonging Medical Staff Applications

When agencies take too long to qualify new employees, it’s more than a mere annoyance for employees and the medical staff they recruit: it can have serious business consequences. Here’s what can happen when physical paperwork and too many touch points prolong medical staff recruitment:

• Doctors fail to join: Staffing agencies must stay attractive both to the hospitals that expect them to bring doctors at a moment’s notice, and to the doctors themselves. The staffing agency that offers a fast and convenient application process will win over the agency that brings complications.
• Agencies waste precious time and resources: Beginning a recruiting process with a potential doctor who fails to get qualified and/or placed is a massive waste of time. All the money and effort that went into recruiting this person cannot be recouped. And even if the doctor ultimately does join, the excess time and resources spent on getting him or her to the finish line is time and resources that fail to go to recruiting additional doctors.
• Reputational damage occurs: A messy application and qualification process, particularly if it involves unclear directions and lengthy paperwork, can lead to reputational damage. Word can get around that the agency is not doctor-friendly, hampering recruitment efforts.

Digital Medical Staff Recruiting: The Next Frontier

For agencies that are (rightly) concerned about their lengthy recruiting processes, there is a better way: digital staff recruitment. The entire end-to-end recruitment process can be completed from a single digital channel, including filling out and uploading all the needed forms and documents. To stay up to date and recruit medical personnel in a compliant way, agencies typically need to gather from prospective staff: - ID verification - An application form - Contractor engagement terms and conditions - Clinical staff questionnaire - Annual review questionnaire - Tuberculosis refusal form - Personal details and address history - Permission to obtain medical evidence form By switching to digital, automated, and streamlined recruiting, agencies can collect these documents easily and overcome the issues described in the previous section. They can spend less time and effort chasing staff for forms, and move on to recruiting new staff. Here, we will explore these use cases for digital medical staff recruitment:

1. ID Verification

Agencies may want or need to verify that a potential medical staff member is who they claim to be. That’s where digital ID verification comes in. There is no need for agencies to scan physical ID cards or search databases. Potential medical staff simply snap a cellphone photo of their official ID, then take a selfie (optionally holding the ID card in it), and send the two photos to the agency. Using AI and machine learning, facial recognition technology can detect with nearly 100% accuracy whether there is a match.

2. Application Form

Electronic forms allow agencies to recruit new medical staff, faster. They are optimized for whatever channel the medical personnel prefers to use, including smartphones. User-friendly digital application forms provide medical staff with an intuitive interface so they can complete all the required information correctly the first time, eliminating rework and chasing. Digital forms simplify the paperwork that often slows processes and frustrates medical staff and agency employees. These smart forms include conditional logic capabilities that can be added to reveal to medical staff only the fields that pertain to their unique characteristics. This allows medical staff to breeze through forms that populate with fields based on their previous responses. Forms get completed faster and with higher accuracy.

3. Contractor Engagement Terms and Conditions

An Independent Contractor Agreement is a contract that spells out the terms of the arrangement between the staffing agency and medical personnel. By digitizing these terms and conditions (T&Cs), as opposed to having agency employees read a T&C script out loud, the company saves employees and medical staff precious time. In addition, digital Terms and Conditions are more compliant, as they can easily be updated, reviewed, and audited.

4. Clinical Staff Questionnaire

Rather than relying on pen-and-paper questionnaires, agencies can easily survey medical staff digitally and remotely. This saves time by reducing paperwork processing and allowing agency employees to review and approve staff answers at a glance.

5. Annual Review Questionnaire

The annual review questionnaire can similarly be digitized, maximizing medical staff survey completion rates and minimizing the time and effort required — both to fill out and review the questionnaire.

6. Tuberculosis Refusal Form

Medical staff who refuse to be treated for latent tuberculosis potentially pose a risk to the patients they interact with. Therefore, refusers may be asked to fill out a form acknowledging this refusal to take preventative therapy. A digital form allows this group to electronically fill out any relevant details and provide an eSignature attesting to the fact of refusal.

7. Personal Details and Address History

Medical staff can quickly provide their personal details and address history on a digital agency form. This reduces the risk of human error, misunderstanding, or confusion. It also makes it easy for agency staff to collect and store the information in the back-office system for future reference.

8. Permission to Obtain Medical Evidence Form

Another form that needs to be filled out and signed, and is greatly expedited by being digitized.

Digitizing Medical Staff Procedures Maximizes ROI

A digital medical staffing process allows agencies to expedite procedures surrounding new medical staff— from the moment an application is received to ongoing compliance and verification tasks. By offering streamlined digital recruitment, agencies can onboarding more efficiently, reduce leakage in the recruitment process, and get medical staff to training faster. Lightico offers such a digital onboarding platform designed to fit the needs of today’s fast-hiring agencies. Capabilities including eSignatures, ID verification, instant document collection, digital storage, and automated workflows come together into a single platform to expedite recruitment.