Auxiliary Staffing Solution for a Growing Physician Practice

Vaco created a complementary resource staffing plan to support the client’s three-phased, one-year hiring initiative. The phases were developed to allow the client time to onboard and assess staff levels while ensuring no interruption in patient care.  

While onboarding temp-to-hire candidates through Vaco, the client simultaneously conducted an assessment of its existing patient access staff to ascertain willingness and ability to commute to the new centralized patient access care center. Any gaps identified through this assessment or subsequent turnover were absorbed into the staffing plan executed by Vaco. 

Vaco presented a timely and cost-effective solution to staff the needed patient access coordinator positions. The solution included: 

• A temp-to-hire staffing solution with a competitive conversion schedule. 
• Ongoing proactive recruitment and screening of patient access candidates based on the client’s specifications to ensure a strong and consistent pipeline of candidates. 
• 1:1 intake sessions with the managers overseeing the patient access team to determine ideal candidate qualities and specifications for the open positions. 
• Managed onsite interview blocks to efficiently schedule pre-screened candidates with the client’s hiring managers; Vaco managed the process from start to finish, allowing managers to accelerate the recruiting process for top candidates. 
• Direct access to the client’s instance of Workday to ensure consistent, real-time access to candidate notes and ease of candidate processing through the recruiting and onboarding lifecycles. 
• Facilitated onboarding activities, like COVID-19 testing, conducting background check and drug screening and ensuring all candidates had active flu vaccines, as part of the candidate screening process to quicken the time to hire after managers identified top candidates for the open roles. 

The Impact

In the first of the three phases of hiring, Vaco successfully filled nearly 30% of the total open patient access coordinator roles, which means the client is on pace to complete the centralization and patient care coordinator hiring initiative as planned. Additional success metrics and benefits to the client include: 

• Resource quality: Four out of every five candidates the client interviewed were hired.
• Time savings: Through Vaco’s proactive and strategic approach, including completing the client’s required onboarding activities (e.g., drug screening, background check) at the time of passed screening (versus when a hiring decision was made), Vaco accelerated the average time to hire by over 75%. 
• Long-term fit: 25% of the patient care coordinators placed by Vaco for the client had previously been engaged on other Vaco assignments; Vaco was able to confirm their background and skill sets and provided previous client feedback and first-hand performance reviews from work completed on other Vaco assignments. 100% of the temp-to-hire candidates onboarded through Vaco were converted to full-time client employees. 

The client continues to express high appreciation for Vaco’s delivery of patient care coordinators, strategic support and solutioning of the patient access centralization initiative. This has resulted in nearly a dozen additional temp-to-hire and direct-hire positions Vaco is executing for the client, including accounting (revenue cycle manager), administrative (medical health records coordinators) and other operational positions (human resources generalists). 

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