7 essential reports HCOs need for locum tenens management

Without effective oversight and clear visibility into usage, locum tenens can be costly and difficult to manage. Healthcare organizations may find themselves working with a long roster of vendors to provide coverage for multiple facilities and across a variety of specialties.  That’s why it’s essential to have reporting tools that put data at your fingertips, allowing you to control costs, improve recruitment, manage vendors, and forecast future locums usage.

Here are seven essential locum tenens utilization reporting tools that Locumsmart provides and how you can use them to improve your operational efficiency and save costs.

1. Locum tenens KPI dashboard

A key performance indicator (KPI) dashboard provides an overall snapshot of your locum tenens program by tracking:

• Locums fill rate
• Bids per request
• Hours to first bid
• Vendors utilized
• Total hours worked
• Year-over-year changes in these metrics

Thomas Lanvers, senior vice president of Locumsmart, recommends checking these locums KPIs at least weekly to monitor recruitment efforts and get an early warning when challenges emerge. Additionally, a report on high-level KPIs makes it easy to keep executives informed about your locum tenens utilization.


Examples of various Locumsmart dashboard reports

2. Locums recruitment activity dashboard

More granular information about your recruitment activity can help identify areas where you can improve recruitment efficiency. A recruitment activity report allows you to dive more deeply into:

• Request fill rate
• Average bids per request
• Median hours until filled
• Reasons for request cancellation

“If you have changes in your fill rate, you want to look at why. Your actions and behaviors can influence that number,” Lanvers says, pointing to the average time it takes to review a CV as one factor that can influence fill rate. “Applicants may go somewhere else if you don’t respond quickly.”

3. Approved invoices dashboard

Invoice reports can provide a wealth of information about your locums spend at each facility and for each specialty, as well as invoiced expenses. A year-over-year invoice comparison lets you track the impact of operational improvements.



Lanvers points out that facility-level data can identify not only the top-spending facilities, but also those that aren’t spending at all. This can be a red flag that the facility is hiring locum providers outside of your organization’s processes or platforms—and likely paying higher costs to do so.

Data about specialty utilization also helps organizations strategize around coverage and ensure that high-value or revenue-generating specialties are receiving adequate support.

Go deeper: How to predict locum tenens usage using data analytics

4. Procurement dashboard

Provider expiration dates are often tracked manually by locums recruiters and managers. Automated procurement reporting can make this process easier and help healthcare organizations save costs when they want to recruit locums providers into permanent staff positions.

“If you've had a provider that's been in the system for a while and their expiration date is coming up in two or three months, you might just want to wait a couple of months and then make them an offer,” Lanvers says.

5. Bid comparison dashboard

On the Locumsmart platform, each locums request receives an average of eight bids. A bid comparison dashboard can help you quickly evaluate multiple bids with easily accessible candidate information. This dashboard scores each candidate based on factors like:

• State licensure
• Feedback from prior assignments
• Previous locums experience
• Malpractice history
• Payor enrollment
• How well they match the position requirements

Bid comparison reporting helps improve locum tenens utilization by making it fast and easy to compare multiple bids and narrow the list to the highest quality providers.

6. Confirmed shifts dashboard

This dashboard is a vital tool for tracking costs and understanding your locums needs. Quite simply, a confirmed shifts dashboard will display confirmed shifts for the current year and prior year, as well as all costs associated with those shifts.

This data can help you pinpoint trends and anomalies, says Lanvers. “This provides those insights that you need to make decisions, especially if you have a centralized organization where things are happening at the site level that you may not know about.”

7. Locum spend projection dashboard

Looking at your confirmed shifts and approved invoices gives you a good look at what’s happening in the moment. A spend projection report can provide you with low, mid, and high projections for future spend based on your organization’s data, enabling you to plan future locums utilization.

For example, could an ongoing locums need be addressed with a permanent hire or by using an advanced practice practitioner instead of a physician? Or could block scheduling address the need while securing savings?

A spend projection report can also show you the pace at which shifts are being added, as well as a monthly distribution of shifts. “This is important because you don't want to see a huge peak and then a drop, because that indicates that your team is scheduling last minute,” Lanvers explains, and last-minute bookings tend to be higher cost.

Locum tenens utilization management

Vendor management platforms like Locumsmart are essential for healthcare organization leaders to be able to take control of their locums spend and improve operational efficiency.



“Be prepared; be proactive. Look at these reports on a daily, monthly, and quarterly basis so that you're educated about what's going on in your organization. Have some power and control over what you're doing with your operations because this is going to set your organization up for long-term success,” Lanvers says.

Get the support you need: Why you should demand consolidated billing from your locum tenens VMS

Ready to optimize your locum tenens utilization? Email us for a demo at sales@locumsmart.net.