This year marks our 13th year providing quality care to facilities and patients who need it, and delivering quality service to our providers and clients. Our founder, John Hayes, reflects on how far we’ve come and how we’re improving our services even more this year, through our focus on service.
“Know, Hospital, People, Want.”
When you sit down to reflect on your history, say the last thirteen years of Hayes Locums, it’s not uncommon to discuss that time with friends, family, and colleagues. And, it’s the norm today to record some of those conversations and get a keystroked transcript of what was said.
Recently, I sat down with some colleagues to reflect and record thoughts on the last thirteen years at Hayes. Among the 8,400 words we used in an hour together, the transcript pointed out our top four most-spoken words. In order, they were “know, hospital, people, want.”
I find that word accounting pretty accurate. You might put those words together in a single sentence to say “our job is to know what hospitals and people want.”
It’s a concise phrase that fits our origin, our years in business, and our vision for the future of locum tenens healthcare staffing.
“People” are the patients, the healthcare providers, and the professionals who run the hospital. “Hospital” is a composite of the demands put on the healthcare industry, plus—importantly—the specific culture and community of a particular hospital’s location. Connecting the right dots to best serve both the people and the hospital remains the Hayes Locums staffing mission. The way we do it—the human-centered relationship approach captured in “know” and “want”—also continues to differentiate us from other locum providers.
Why we began is why we’re still here, as the 5th largest locums agency in the U.S.
Ironically, as we talked, our origin was the last topic we considered. I’ll mention it here first, because to a large extent, why we began is why we’re still here.
Hayes Locums opened its doors on the belief that a close relationship with both the hospital and the providers was the best way to practice healthcare staffing and serve the ultimate customer: the patient.
This human-centered style is one that we didn’t see everywhere in the locum tenens business. By consistently doing the right thing—listening to what the hospital needed and what the providers wanted to do—we were able to deliver the best healthcare matches. By doing right by our hospital clients and our providers, we did right by the patients. That’s the foundation— the principles—our business is built on.
The reason we began is the reason we’re still here.
Still today, Hayes Locums is accountable, transparent, and efficient—consistently—because we know both our hospitals and providers well. It is a model that made us the fifth-largest locum company in the country. Who knew where it would go when we began?
Scaling, then evolving: how our principles have grown with the changing healthcare landscape
There are two practices that best explain the successful evolution of Hayes.
1. Scaling alongside our principles
Our first major milestone came as the company grew. We were fortunate to add hundreds of team members who had the same attention to service, and the understanding (or at least a willingness to learn) that a relationship with both the hospital and the healthcare providers was the path to the best matches for the best care—and the best business.
The time and resources we put into developing a leadership team, and the time and effort we put into training consultants to follow the healthcare staffing principles and practices we envisioned from the beginning, have served our company well.
It’s what has allowed us to scale up our size without sacrificing our principles.
A core piece of scaling up our size while holding on to our principles is our risk management team. If it weren’t for our risk management team, our company wouldn’t have stayed true to the quality we set out to provide. So if I were saying what’s been most significant in guiding us these thirteen years, I would have to include the stability we’ve had in risk management. One example of growing while getting better is learning what it takes to place providers in certain specialties as those specialties grow and change. It’s an ongoing risk management process that requires professionals who are dedicated to doing the work, to doing the learning, to live up to our mantra of putting quality care over our own bottom line.
2. Evolving with hospital growth and change
As I mentioned at the top of this article, “our job is to know what hospitals and people want.” What the hospitals and providers want is changing.
Some people, including recruiters inside the hospital, are simply gone from the business—retired. Those who are still in the healthcare industry are changing too, because their hospital is changing. Now, most hospitals are part of larger hospital systems. Larger systems need continuity of methods, from the clinical side to the business side, including locum tenens staffing.
We’ve responded by scaling our relationship-driven approach: not only to more people inside our own company, but also to more stakeholders across the entire hospital ecosystem. We’re committing to accountability, transparency, efficiency, and consistency across the board, for the entire hospital or hospital system.
Introducing the LocumScope portal
We’re scaling up to serve our clients’ evolving needs, while still holding on to our relationship-driven principles. This human-centered mission remains rare in healthcare staffing. At the center of this effort is LocumScope, a custom portal that speaks to the entire hospital—and hospital system—from recruiting, to the CFO, to the CEO.
Our relationship with each hospital now has a formal, centralized location that holds the history and the detailed workings of ongoing locum service. It’s not only imperative that Hayes makes the right provider match with the hospital, it’s critical that the entire business relationship be visible to the entire hospital administration, from credentialing to travel, to invoicing, and to tracking and forecasting.
It comes down to the most-used word that I mentioned at the beginning: “know.” Giving people at the hospital and at Hayes Locums the information they need to know to do their best work—and being able to share that information with not only one hospital, but with three or more other hospitals in a system.
Where in the recent past, we might have been working with one or two recruiters in a hospital, that team might now be five to ten across an entire hospital system.
We’re responding to that growth by taking best practices across the entire system to work with each hospital location in the same, consistent way: a way that is easy and understandable across the board. A way that can more easily sustain personnel changes, communicating the necessary information for past, present, and future needs.
LocumScope technology saves hospitals time and money by giving transparency and accountability to the entire cycle of a locum assignment, and then aggregating all the data from those assignments across an entire hospital system. It’s a completely unique workforce solution in the industry—and dedicated to a single locum provider. It’s also unique because it charges no fees to the hospital users.
Here’s what we know at 13 years: At Hayes Locums, our guiding principles have not changed.
Our job is still knowing what hospitals and people want—to deliver the best healthcare staffing matches and do right by the patients.
But maintaining our steadfast principles requires evolution. It always has. I’m proud to see our current leadership, consultants, and the entire company evolving confidently as our industry changes, including hiring new team members and training them in the same listening and relationship-driven approach that we had when we opened our doors in 2012. Adding technology that expands our accountability, transparency, efficiency, and consistency to our hospital customers’ entire ecosystems is just one more way that we’re responding to our client’s needs.
Happy 13th anniversary to all of our partners and team members, and thank you for blessing us with your partnership!
