The modern day doc
Welcome to Locums Digest, Locumpedia’s free bi-weekly roundup of industry news and trends that helps locum tenens agencies and healthcare facilities make informed business decisions.
In this edition: As the healthcare industry evolves, locum tenens providers need more than medical expertise to stay competitive in their careers. With AI, automation, remote work, and global crises reshaping healthcare, employers need adaptable, tech-savvy team players. Luckily, your locum providers bring more than medical expertise—skills like critical thinking, adaptability, digital literacy, and collaboration remain in high demand.
Beyond Medicine: Essential Skills Physicians and APPs Need
January 31, 2025 | Medix
Success for a physician or APP is no longer only about demonstrating their best medical expertise. Rapid technological advancements in automation and AI, shifting economic priorities emphasizing remote and hybrid workforces, and global events requiring human-to-human response mean employers seek well-rounded, nimble, and collaborative team members.
Discuss with your locums that many skills, in addition to their strengths in diagnostic and treatment, will continue to be in demand. They can boost their employability by expanding and highlighting their skills and expertise in several areas:
- Critical thinking
- Feature decision-making that involves evaluating multiple perspectives
- Analyze real-world scenarios and generate actionable solutions.
- Adaptability
- Seek projects that will require you to work outside your wheelhouse
- Practice mindfulness
- Join professional networks and seek mentorship
- Digital savviness
- Stay current with industry-specific technology
- Become proficient with efficiency hacks, especially with different EHRs
- Read about emerging technologies
- Collaboration
- Participate in projects that involve cross-functional collaboration
- Sign up to present or teach
- Creativity
- Brainstorm with colleagues from past assignments
- Pursue hobbies that hone your imagination or focus on skills entirely outside what you do at work
- Study structured methods for generating or refining innovative ideas
La Vida Locum
It’s Time to Get Packing for the NALTO/NAPR Convention, March 5–7
February 18, 2025 | Locumpedia
The premier locums staffing conference is fast approaching, so check your sunscreen supply. We’ll see you at the NALTO/NAPR Convention in Ponte Vedra, Florida, March 5–7.
There, you’ll find hands-on workshops, engaging presentations, and after-hours events that are productive and fun.
- Sharpen your strategies with the latest industry trends, insights, and projections.
- Understand legislative developments.
- Learn networking and communication best practices and then apply them at the many social events with other industry leaders.
- Gain practical strategies for succeeding no matter what changes happen in the industry.
Learn and share. Reconnect with longtime colleagues and grow your network by meeting new people. And of course, head home from the conference with more knowledge, energy, and some good stories to share around the office.
Stop by booth 309 to say hello to the Locumpedia team!
Telehealth Surge Increases Demand for Locum Physicians and APPs with Remote Expertise
February 3, 2025 | Health Leaders Media
With many locum physicians and APPs licensed in multiple states, they are great candidates for telehealth roles, which can be an efficient way to “travel” and add assignments without leaving home. As the reliance on telemedicine intensifies, locums with this experience and skill will be ever more in demand.
The percentage of hospitals using telehealth was significant before the pandemic, around 70% in 2018. Just four years later, even after many in-person services had reopened, that number was nearly 90%. In a single quarter of 2023, almost 13% of Medicare patients alone received a telemedicine service.
For remote communities, telemedicine may be revolutionary. About a third of all rural hospitals are in danger of closing due to a shortage of physicians and funds; 20% of the country’s rural population already live in counties without a single hospital. This lack of access is particularly deadly when it comes to time-sensitive, complex conditions; for example, cancer mortality rates are 2% in urban communities and 15% in rural ones. Those numbers could improve if a physician could see a patient from anywhere.
One challenge remains—technological connectivity. While audio-only Medicare telehealth access has increased, there are still limitations since it does not require a personal computer or smartphone. More than 20% of rural Americans lack access to the quality of internet needed for a video-audio service. At a healthcare organization level, traditionally siloed services mean each hospital must work to succeed on its own.
A push to bring high-speed internet to remote areas and hub-and-spoke telemedicine platforms that allow facilities to share resources would mitigate these issues. Locum physicians and APPs will be ready to meet this growing need by positioning themselves to work in telehealth.
“Behind the Mask”: The National Doctors’ Day Resource Toolkit Is Here
February 13, 2025 | Locumpedia
While National Doctors’ Day has always been a day of appreciation, this year’s celebration seeks to go deeper, encouraging actionable steps toward systemic change to support physician well-being.
The year’s theme asks us to work beyond the surface level—“Behind the Mask: Caring for Caregivers” suggests the importance of doing everything from thanking physicians to helping improve their lives.
To facilitate meaningful recognition, the Locumpedia team has created a comprehensive toolkit:
- Updated statistics on physician health and causes of challenges such as burnout
- Resources for doctors
- Financial planning advice
- Mental health support
- Wellness strategies
- Campaign ideas for staffing firms and healthcare facilities
- Online shop of thank-you gifts
- Customizable assets such as email templates and social media graphics, as well as logos, typography, and colors
We’ll continue to add to the resources section, so please contact us if you have any requests or tips to share.
New Docs Can Be Great Locums
January 24, 2025 | MDStaffers
Many physicians newly out of residency or fellowship are just beginning to determine what they’re looking for in a hospital or other setting, where in the country they’d like to call home, and even which patient population they believe they can most significantly impact. By exploring locums early in their careers, physicians can meet facilities’ workforce needs while strengthening their skills and exploring their location options.
- Explore different practice settings. From urban teaching hospitals to rural clinics and across different practice styles, patient populations, team dynamics, and communities—locum assignments offer new physicians insights into how to further their professional and personal objectives.
- Hone and expand skills. Working on various cases and with physicians in different specialties helps those new to the career sharpen their skills and round out their knowledge and experience.
- Earn competitive compensation. Locums’ pay rates can exceed those for permanent roles, which is significant for starting to pay down school debt and save for the future.
- Enjoy work-life balance. For physicians concluding a hectic, nonstop educational program, knowing that a break of their chosen length is coming at the end of every locums assignment can be invaluable for their mental health and meeting their personal goals.
- Expand professional networks. Building relationships across the country and specialties can lead to opportunities throughout a locums professional’s career.
- Develop independence and adaptability. A locums physician quickly strengthens their organizational and communication skills as they coordinate with their staffing agency and new team. With each new assignment, they learn new EHR systems and facility protocols. The confidence and problem-solving skills that grow from this will carry along any career path.
Evaluate Assignments with Workplace Factors in Mind
January 31, 2025 | Neurology Advisor
According to findings published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, control over the work environment is key to reducing physician burnout. The factors that were independently associated with burnout and wanting to leave the job included physicians’ lack of perceived or actual control over:
- Caseload
- Clinical schedule
- Who else is on the team
Understanding what the facility offers in these three areas can help you educate locums candidates when evaluating a new assignment. While locums may be coming in to help alleviate schedule and workload challenges, permanent staff may be hesitant to have new team members. By understanding these parts of an assignment and sharing your findings with your locums, you better ensure assignments align with their needs.
Optimizing Physician CVs for Locums: Key Tips for Recruiters to Help Candidates Stand Out
January 8, 2025 | DocCafe
The recruiter is best positioned to help a physician prepare their CV for locums assignments. You understand how ATS software works and what your clients are looking for. It’s also a good practice to understand the CV-writing advice providers are finding online, including:
- Key components of any medical CV
- Structure and career highlights appropriate for new physicians versus experienced ones
- Best practices for including non-clinical experience
- ATS optimization
- Ways to tailor a CV to each assignment
- Common mistakes to avoid
Locum Leaders
Locum Firms Rated Among Staffing’s Best By Their Internal Employees
February 4, 2025 | ClearlyRated
ClearlyRated’s 2025 Best of Staffing Award winners have been announced, and the survey of internal employees, excluding working providers, shows several locums firms have once again earned high marks. Only firms that earned exceptional satisfaction ratings that outpace industry benchmarks for service qualified for the 2025 Best of Staffing award. The following locums firms were recognized for their employee-driven results:
- Medicus Healthcare Solutions
- Medstaff National Medical Staffing
- MPLT Healthcare
ClearlyRated is the only client—and employee-driven staffing award in the US and Canada. It compiles its results using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology, collecting feedback and measuring satisfaction throughout the year. ClearlyRated publishes three awards: one based on client feedback, another from working talent, and the third from employees.
MPLT Welcomes New CFO
February 5, 2025 | MPLT Healthcare
Shaun Porter has joined MPLT Healthcare as the agency’s new CFO. He brings 15 years of experience with organizations across education, education technology, and staffing. Porter will use his extensive background in financial leadership and his ability to manage cross-functional teams, as MPLT continues to innovate in the staffing space.
Hire Power
Key Metrics Every Agency Can Track
January 10, 2025 | Access Capital
Tracking key performance indicators is crucial to your agency’s positioning, growth, and success in this competitive market. The following metrics are three of the most significant:
- Placement rate: Because it is crucial to your agency’s reputation, your agency’s placement rate should be reviewed regularly. Regularly seek feedback to refine your process.
- Time to fill: Faster placements mean happy clients and locum providers. Analyze patterns in delays to identify and address bottlenecks.
- Client and locums satisfaction: If clients and locums have good experiences working with your agency, they’re more likely to continue their relationship with you and refer you to colleagues. Practice good communication, provide clear updates, and promptly act on feedback.
Elevate Client Care by Spotlighting What You Do Best
January 31, 2025 | Alumni Healthcare Staffing
When putting your best foot forward for clients, your agency has several to showcase. While you always want to meet each client where they uniquely are, paying attention to your universal strengths will help you with every facility:
- Immediate access to vetted physicians and APPs: Your rigorous screening process, including background checks and skills assessments, ensures that every provider on your roster meets the highest standards.
- Prompt and efficient placement: Your extensive database and industry expertise allow you to quickly find the right locums.
- Customized staffing solutions: You take the time to understand each facility’s needs, from skills to cultural competency. You can tailor solutions even to address critical needs.
- Smooth process: Your team ensures that all physicians and APPs meet federal, state, and facility licensing and standards. Then, you can maintain workforce management once the assignment has started.
- Cost-effective recruitment: You help facilities reduce time-to-hire costs by quickly filling a role with locums.
- Enhanced staff satisfaction: Your agency’s locums ensure appropriate staffing levels, alleviating workload pressures and contributing to a more balanced work environment.
Making the Rounds
Women Physicians Transforming Healthcare Culture
February 3, 2025 | Hayes Locums
Across specialties, the number of women physicians is growing, which can contribute significantly to the workplace culture.
- Women are nearly 40% of the physician workforce.
- They became the majority of US medical school students in 2019.
- Women are most of the physicians in pediatrics (nearly 70%), OB/GYN (over 60%), and dermatology (more than 50%). They are approaching the 50% mark in pathology and psychiatry.
- Even in specialties that have almost entirely been men, women are expanding their influence—for example, they are nearly 30% of radiologists.
As physician leaders and administrators, many women are championing collaborative care models, reshaping wellness policies, and reimagining the workplace to center everyone’s success and well-being, physicians’ and patients’. When it comes to reenvisioned sustainable staffing strategies, many of these innovative leaders consider locums front and center in their efforts for balanced, financially viable workplaces.
Rising Demand for CRNAs and Growing Autonomy Opens Doors for Locum Providers
January 24, 2025 | Medicus Healthcare Solutions
Demand for CRNAs is projected to grow by as much as 10% over the next decade. About a third of all US hospitals and two-thirds of those in rural areas use CRNAs exclusively for their anesthesiology services. They can make the most of these providers’ expertise because most states (32) plus Washington, DC, allow CRNAs to practice without anesthesiologist supervision. This has opened the door wide for locum CRNAs who have multiple licenses.
AI Revolutionizing Healthcare: Boosting Efficiency and Reducing Burnout
February 1, 2025 | South Florida Hospital News
AI plays a transformative role in the healthcare sector by streamlining time-consuming tasks, allowing physicians to focus on patient care and improving job satisfaction. Facilities that have been using AI for a few years are now showing that certain technology-led efforts are having concrete positive effects.
- Recording and transcribing a physician’s notes in real time: The detail and accuracy of these notes continue to improve and reduce a doctor’s after-hours work.
- Responding to certain messages: This allows physicians to focus on complex communication while ensuring every patient request is met with a timely response.
- Monitoring and reporting patient symptoms: Wearable medical devices can monitor health conditions, seamlessly report them to the physician, and set up follow-up appointments.
Sponsored Content
Healthcare Leadership in 2025: Adapting to Change with Planning and Consistency
2025 | OnCall Solutions
As medical leadership stands at the precipice of a new age in healthcare, it’s helpful to review what happened last year to bring us to this point and what lies ahead.
Three trends significantly shaped healthcare in 2024:
- Telemedicine expanded across specialties, an advancement that had a particularly noticeable effect on rural communities.
- Flexible work models allowed physicians and APPs to regain some work-life balance.
- APP scope grew as the need for specialists in urgent care, emergency medicine, and internal medicine surged.
Now, agencies can help facility leadership hone their attention to these changes in these ways:
- Navigate regulatory shifts. Upcoming changes may relate to licensing requirements, scope of practice, and patient-to-clinician ratios. By guiding their physicians and APPs to stay ahead of these updates, agencies can help them stay indispensable; by supporting their clients in designing proactive staffing strategies, they can enhance patient care and ensure operational efficiency and compliance.
- Address the retirement wave. More than two out of every five practicing physicians will reach retirement age over the next decade. Leaders who establish a sustainable staffing plan, that includes roles like locums, and prioritize succession planning and mentorship programs will help their facilities through this transition.
- Embrace even more flexibility. For many, having control over their own schedules is even more important than salary. Leadership can enhance physician and APP well-being, improve retention rates, and increase productivity by responding to what their top talent wants.
Agency partners can help facilities adapt to this rapidly changing environment by building resilient teams that maintain high-quality patient care while stabilizing facilities for future challenges.
Staying Ahead of 2025 Medicare Cuts: Smart Oncology Staffing Strategies for Long-Term Success
February 10, 2025 | Cancer CarePoint
In 2025, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized a near 3% reduction in the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, with medical oncology facing an even more significant 4% cut. These reimbursement reductions raise concerns about staffing, resource allocation, and patient access to care.
To address these challenges, oncology practices can adopt proactive staffing strategies:
- Leverage locum tenens: Utilizing locum tenens oncologists offers flexibility, allowing practices to adjust staffing levels without long-term commitments. This approach helps prevent coverage gaps, ensures continuity of care, and reduces provider burnout.
- Integrate advanced practice providers: Nurse practitioners and physician assistants can manage routine follow-ups and symptom management, alleviating physicians’ workloads and optimizing costs.
- Implement AI and data-driven workforce planning: Artificial intelligence tools can predict staffing needs and optimize scheduling, reducing unnecessary overtime and administrative burdens.
- Expand telehealth services: Offering virtual consultations and remote symptom management improves patient access and reduces the demand for in-person visits, enhancing efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
By embracing these strategies, oncology practices can mitigate the impact of Medicare cuts, maintain high-quality care, and support their financial health.
