Healthcare Payors: Effective Management Tips for Your Contingent Workforce

In this article, we discuss: 

• Extended Workforce Management for Healthcare Payors: The 30 Second Test
• Optimizing the Management of Contingent Workers

As a healthcare payor, getting the full picture of your contingent workforce is essential to effectively manage these workers. A vendor management system (VMS) gives your organization a streamlined system for extended workforce management and worker profile management, eliminating silos so you can further optimize your contingent workforce. Having a premier system in place that can speed up the hiring, provisioning, and training processes for the contingent workforce is essential for overall operational efficiency for the healthcare payor community.

Extended Workforce Management for Healthcare Payors

Between rising costs of care, regulatory complexity, and ever-expanding member expectations, health insurers are looking for both flexibility and scale as they expand their operations.

The contingent workforce augments the teams your organization already has in place. These workers often bring the skills or extra capacity needed to support key business functions, enabling teams to work more effectively. Payor organizations reported on a recent Workday VNDLY panel that as much as 40% of their workforce is comprised of contingent workers. These workers may be staffing call centers to answer member questions, enrolling members during open enrollment, building new apps, or playing many other essential roles. There’s a need to not only track headcount but to also manage these workers as an integral part of the workforce strategy.

While having the tools to manage the growing contingent workforce is key, also adopting technology in tandem to understand skills gaps in your organization is essential. Being able to pivot your existing workforce into new roles rather than relying on growing the already challenging-to-manage contingent workforce can help streamline processes in payor organizations.

Being able to answer basic questions about the contingent workforce is sometimes difficult due to siloed sourcing and hiring data. Typically, this is due to insufficient management of contingent workers or data not being efficiently shared between systems.

We suggest using a simple Q&A test to see if your organization has easily accessible data about its contingent workforce.

Try to answer all five of these questions within 30 seconds:

1. How much are you spending on contractors? 
2. Which systems and sites do your contractors have access to; for example, do they have access to Google drive or to an email address? Are they exposed to protected health information (PHI)? If yes, are they trained about the rules associated with working with PHI?
3. Where are the extended workers located? Are they office-based? Are they remote? Are they in a call center? 
4. What are your contingent workers working on? Where are they logging time? How are they benefitting the organization?
5. Are your contingent workers provisioned properly? Are they deprovisioned correctly?

If you cannot answer these questions in under 30 seconds, you may need to consider whether or not your organization has a good system in place to manage extended workers. Keeping in mind that around 40% of workers in many payor organizations are contingent, this could be a major gap in your workforce management strategy.

A VMS can facilitate the sourcing and hiring of extended workers, while also seamlessly connecting to an HCM and other software in your tech stack to ensure that a cohesive strategy is implemented across your entire organization.

Optimizing the Management of Contingent Workers

Important day-to-day tasks for managing the external workforce require technology that can standardize and simplify processes. Whether it’s provisioning new equipment or transferring access from one facility to another, having a standard process in place that’s easy for daily users to complete is essential.

“One of the issues we faced [before adding a VMS] was that our managers didn’t have a consistent process. They were having to enter contingent workers into two different systems,” said a representative from a large healthcare payor based in North Carolina. “We had a hard time auditing the data—making sure the data was clean in those systems—and had issues with the information feeding down into finance as well.”

Data is key to understanding and optimizing the management and utilization of the contingent workforce. A VMS allows for easier access to data, and that data becomes more reliable overall by streamlining the process for collecting it to reduce human error or other discrepancies. Not only can this data be used to help understand important aspects relating to your contingent workforce such as cost and headcount but it can also be used across your organization for strategic planning.

Leveraging data about your contingent workforce alongside data about your full-time employees makes it easier to get the bigger picture across your entire workforce. This allows finance, procurement, and HR to work together to better prepare for your organization’s needs, including hiring, onboarding, provisioning, and training contingent workers at speed to make the most impact for your organization.

“Now we have significant tools in place, and we’re all aligned on the processes,” said a representative from a large healthcare payor based in North Carolina. “It’s understanding everything that our VMS can do and how it can better support our organization.”

With such a large population of contingent workers in the payor sector, looking beyond the basics is also important. As your organization begins to move toward fully optimizing your overall workforce strategy, continuing to factor in contingent workers is key to having the full picture.

To continue to learn about managing the contingent workforce in the healthcare space, watch our webinar with SimpliFi + Advocate.