NATHO Quarterly
Newsletter
1st Quarter, 2010
Dear NATHO Members – I am
pleased to announce that NATHO is now nearly two years old and things are going
great! I am extremely excited at not
only how far we have come in our first two years but also with how many great
things that lay ahead. I want to take
this opportunity to give a very big THANK YOU to all our of NATHO
members for making NATHO possible.
As a reminder, the purpose of the National Association of Traveling Healthcare Organizations (NATHO) is to provide a forum for companies providing Travel Healthcare services. This forum helps sets ethical and professional guidelines which provide the foundation of relationships between NATHO members and their clients.
In addition, NATHO
is committed to continuous educational programming that focuses on the exchange
of ideas about the standards of the industry and changes in the Travel
Healthcare marketplace, which affects NATHO members. NATHO further commits to a leadership role in the following areas: (1) Developing
a positive image of the Travel Healthcare industry and (2) a peer review
process based on excellence, honesty, and fairness.
Here are some of the
things that NATHO has been working on:
Membership: NATHO
now has approximately 50 members representing over 90% of the Travel Healthcare
staffing revenue in the nation. We have
a large cross section of members including large firms, small firms, nurse
staffing as well as allied staffing.
Tax-Free
FAQ: NATHO has completed a
comprehensive FAQ guideline for how Travel firms should be paying their
tax-free per diems to Travelers. This
FAQ was sent to all active NATHO members.
A shorter, Traveler version of the Tax FAQs is located on the NATHO
website.
Group
Purchasing: NATHO is in negotiations
with many service providers that our industry utilizes (furniture rental,
apartments, car rentals, insurance, clinical testing center, job boards, etc…)
to negotiate volume pricing that will be made available to NATHO members.
NPDB: Access to the National Practitioner Data Bank
(NPDB) was recently opened up to healthcare staffing firms. The NPDB tracks all adverse licensure actions
(suspensions, revocations, etc…) for healthcare professionals nationwide. The NPDB should be used, in conjunction with
state licensing board verification sites, to better screen healthcare professionals
to ensure the highest quality candidates for our hospital clients. The process
for getting approved to access the NPDB is somewhat complex and NATHO is
developing a “How-To” manual that will assist NATHO firms gain access to the
NPDB. For more information on the NPDB
please visit their website at http://www.npdb-hipdb.com/.
Benchmarking: In January 2009, NATHO began a benchmarking index that
tracks the number of open Travel RN job orders as well as the number of Travel
RNs on contract. This database is in the
process of being expanded to include allied Travelers. As you can see from the chart below, job
orders contracted dramatically in the 1st half of 2009 and then
spiked in the 4th quarter.
Order then fell dramatically again and have largely been stable for the
1st quarter 2010. The number of RNs on
assignment fell dramatically in the 1st half of 2009 and has
remained essentially flat for the past 3 quarters.
Companies that participate in the benchmarking
survey have full access to all data on a weekly basis. If you would like to participate in the
survey, please E-mail info@natho.org.
Associate
Members: NATHO is actively seeking industry
partners to be Associate Members of NATHO (job boards, insurance companies,
payroll companies, service firms, etc…).
If you know of any firms that might make good Associate Members, please
E-mail NATHO at info@natho.org. Here is a list of our current Associate
Members:
|
Associate Member |
Website |
E-mail |
|
Clearview
Staffing Software, Inc |
||
|
Travel Tax LLC |
||
|
Healthcare
Travelbook |
||
|
Arthur J.
Gallagher Risk Management |
Technology: NATHO has launched a technology steering committee to develop a software connectivity standard that will allow healthcare staffing firms to automatically share data with Vendor Managed Service (VMS) and Master Service Provider (MSP) firms. The committee, comprised of leading healthcare staffing and VMS/MSP firms, is rapidly developing a connectivity software standard for our industry.
This connectivity standard will be available to NATHO members and will largely eliminate the current industry practice, which is both extremely time consuming and expensive, whereby staffing firms manually enter candidates’ data into a VMS/MSP firms’ database and also manually enter job order information from the VMS/MSP firms’ database into their own.
Clinical
Council: NATHO has formed the CEC
(Clinical Executive Council) to develop standards of clinical excellence for
our industry. The CEC has already
developed best practices for screening healthcare professionals as well as
principles for healthcare staffing firms.
Click
here to view the two documents. In addition, both documents can be found on
the NATHO website.
VMS/MSP
Escrows: NATHO is working to establish a
relationship with a nationwide financial escrow processing firm through which VMS/MSP
providers can process payments to their vendors. When VMS/MSP firms utilize escrow services to
pay their vendors, similar to what Shiftwise is currently doing, vendors
receive their payments more quickly and the risk of loss due to VMS/MSP financial
difficulties (i.e. Symbio, Vendtegrity, Chimes) is greatly reduced.
Traveler Cost Study: The NATHO board, on behalf of its members, has engaged KPMG
to perform and publish a cost study on the full cost of a permanent nurse vs. a
travel nurse. We anticipate that this white paper will reveal that a
fully loaded cost of a permanent nurse is similar to the cost of a travel
nurse, and there are additional benefits of using travel nurses such as
flexible staffing. Having a well respected third party conduct this study
is critical to it being well received within the industry, and will help change
the current perception of travel nurses being a more expensive option than
permanent staff. The summary results will be widely publicized throughout
the industry and the detailed report will be available to NATHO members.
The
total cost of the study is anticipated to be $65,000 plus expenses.
To fund this landmark study, there will be
a special assessment in 2010 as follows:
NATHO members with annual revenue in excess
of $100M = $5,000
NATHO members with annual revenues under
$100M in revenue = $2,000
Any
excess funding will be refunded pro-rata following completion of the
study. We feel you will agree we have done a lot with relatively low
annual membership fees, and trust everyone agrees the value to all travel
staffing firms for this comprehensive and unbiased KPMG study will be well
worth this one-time special assessment.
We thank you in advance for support of this great cause and look forward
to the findings of the study!
Annual
Meeting: NATHO will host our annual
membership meeting in conjunction with the Staffing Industry Healthcare
Staffing conference in
Other
Ideas?: We are always
appreciative of ideas or suggestions of projects that NATHO can undertake. We also, always welcome membership
participation to help with various committees and projects.
Many NATHO members are
helping with various projects and we appreciate all of your help. If your firm would like to get more involved
with NATHO, please just send us an E-mail to info@natho.org
I would also like to give
a special thanks to our board members for all of their hard work with NATHO:
Allison Beer – RN
Network
Bobbi Henson – Medfinders
Cynthia Kinnas – Clinical One
Jonathan Ward – Cross
Country Staffing
Kris Cannon – On
Assignment
Steve Wehn – AMN
Healthcare
Thanks for your time and I
look forward to seeing all of you at our upcoming annual meeting in Chicago.
-
Mark
Mark Stagen
President, NATHO
CEO, Emerald Health
Services