John A. Martins

So, we started by asking, “What do we need first?” We knew what we needed first was a Vendor Management System (VMS)  so that we could manage our clients' needs and go beyond their contingency labor.

We asked ourselves, how do we help manage their core staff? So, we built our VMS technology, which is the core of our technology for the client - our bread and butter so to speak.

Our VMS manages a client’s contingent labor, everything from daily shifts to per diem labor. We then built out an app that allows clinicians to pick up a shift at a time, or lets hospitals book a shift at a time. This gives clients more flexibility, transparency, and most importantly - access to people.

We then looked at clients to uncover their pain points and inefficiencies. What we realized was that there are inefficiencies in hospitals that look to use contingent labor first when external labor should be their last choice. These hospitals should be looking internally to say, do we have existing clinicians who can actually work?

This investigation led us to build out our internal resource pool (IRP) technology. This piece of tech allows hospitals to build their internal resource pools for greater efficiency and cost-savings. Utilizing their internal resources first won't cost facilities more money and gives them visibility into the resources they already have at their disposal.

This IRP technology helps hospitals look and see who's the best option available based on price. It then allows teams to choose whether they want to schedule internal team members before automatically outsourcing external clinicians.

For Healthcare Facility Clients:

Building smart technologies to help hospitals manage their core labor was first and foremost when creating this product. We wanted to give clients a streamlined, transparent method of easily managing all of their labor - whether internal or external.

For Healthcare Facility Clients:

Building smart technologies to help hospitals manage their core labor was first and foremost when creating this product. We wanted to give clients a streamlined, transparent method of easily managing all of their labor - whether internal or external.

For Healthcare Professionals:

At the same time, we also wanted to create a great experience on the front end for our professionals. Similar to many of the apps you've seen in the shifts market, we built one for travel and, of course, shift and per diem workers.

So, what we did was to build technology that allows us to walk clinicians through every step of the process so that they can go from the door to the floor in a seamless fashion.
With this app, clinicians can do everything from uploading their credentials, applying for an assignment, managing their onboarding processing and everything in between. All while receiving notification reminders for the next step. And that's really where we spent a lot of our time and continue to spend a lot of time on really building those products out.

At the end of the day, Cross Country has come a long way. We have matured from this older staffing company with antiquated technology, to become a modern tech-enabled platform that seamlessly integrates our technology to match professionals to clients and jobs. A true 180 from the company’s first day in operation.  

The Importance of Pay Rate Transparency

When I started looking at how to create value for professionals and clinicians in the travel nurse and healthcare staffing worlds in 2015, many companies came to market that were cold recruiter lists. At this point, they were slowly starting to bring pay transparency to the market, as there was still no pay transparency yet in the travel nurse world.

There would be mention of pay-rate ranges, however, the most common response was,  “Call me to find out what you get paid.” Eventually other organizations began to work on pay transparency and others started to follow. However, it didn't take on very well as people were resistant to these technologies and the companies pushing them. But then COVID hit. And, as we all know, in COVID-19, with travel nurses and the allied world, pay rates sky-rocketed. There were clinicians earning anywhere from $5,000 or $10,000 dollars in a week. At that point, pay rate transparency became incredibly important.

It became table stakes; everyone went for pay rate transparency. But one of the things we realized at Cross Country was that while everyone shifted toward pay transparency, as well as us, no one was really helping the client with bill rate transparency.

Making Bill Rate Data Actionable

One of the big opportunities we saw, and we've really capitalized on over the last year since we launched our new product, Data Aggregation Services (DAS), is how you can look at the market data using some of our own resources plus independent resources to see where the market is trending in terms of bill rates.

Because when you're working with a hospital as your client, the question they care about is: how do I reduce my spending? Hospitals were bleeding money through COVID-19; they had to figure out how to survive. Many of these hospitals were having trouble staying profitable, so they started reducing their use of contingent labor. They also started looking at how to hire more core staff. Seeing these trends, we asked, how can we help them manage internal labor?

The Power of Data in Workforce Management

Facilities will eventually need to outsource contingent labor, and we wanted to make sure that they were empowered to have the tools in front of them when the time came. We wanted hospitals to be able to see where the bill rates were and where they were trending and give them a say in their budget.

With that came the birth of DAS. This tool enables facilities to see a low, a mid, and a high market rate.

DAS gives them the power to say:  “We can test this out, and we can see,” and “We also understand, based upon the data that Cross Country provides or DAS provides, we understand what is going to be the throughput and the acceleration of placements depending upon our rate. And then we can tweak it and play with it.”

And that has been very empowering for clients.