This article is based off an article that first appeared in The Future of Work Exchange.
Over the past several years, healthcare leaders have been forced to confront a hard truth: workforce stability can no longer be treated as an operational afterthought. The COVID-19 pandemic did not create the healthcare staffing crisis, but it exposed, intensified, and permanently reshaped it.
That reality was at the center of a recent FOWX podcast by Ardent Partners, featuring our CEO, Kelly Rakowski, in a broader discussion on the extended workforce, technology innovation, and the evolving role of vendor management systems (VMS) in healthcare. Ardent’s accompanying article series provides a valuable industry lens on how contingent staffing has moved from a tactical stopgap to a strategic imperative.
From Trio’s vantage point, this moment represents more than recovery. It marks a structural reset in how healthcare organizations must think about talent, flexibility, and resilience.
Long before COVID-19 entered the picture, healthcare workforce models were showing signs of stress. Demand variability, seasonal fluctuations, regional population shifts, and chronic shortages in nursing and physician supply forced health systems to rely on contingent labor simply to maintain baseline operations.
These pressures were not episodic, they were systemic. Educational bottlenecks limited the pipeline of new clinicians. Retirement trends accelerated. Meanwhile, care delivery itself grew more complex, requiring specialized skills that could not always be supported by traditional full-time staffing models.
Contingent labor emerged as a pressure valve, not because it was novel, but because it was necessary.
COVID-19 Changed the Conversation at the Executive Level
The pandemic transformed contingent staffing from a workforce issue into a boardroom issue.
As patient surges collided with clinician illness, burnout, and quarantine, healthcare organizations leaned heavily on travel nurses and locum tenens clinicians to sustain care delivery. At the same time, labor costs spiked while elective procedures—the financial backbone of many systems—were paused or eliminated altogether.
For the first time, many executive teams and boards were directly exposed to the scale, cost, and complexity of workforce decision-making. Staffing was no longer just about filling shifts; it became inseparable from financial performance, quality outcomes, and organizational survival.
That executive-level visibility has not receded, and it shouldn’t.
As the industry stabilized, some metrics normalized. Rates adjusted. Crisis conditions eased. But the workforce itself did not revert to its pre-pandemic state.
Utilization of contingent labor remains materially higher than it was before COVID-19. Clinicians now expect flexibility as a baseline, not a perk. Internal travel programs, float pools, and hybrid workforce models are increasingly common. Healthcare professionals are making career decisions based on autonomy, balance, and control, mirroring broader labor market trends.
For healthcare leaders, this means the question is no longer whether to use contingent labor, but how to integrate it intelligently and sustainably into long-term workforce strategy.
Managing this new workforce reality with legacy processes is neither scalable nor defensible. Credentialing complexity, compliance risk, licensure requirements, and patient safety standards demand precision and transparency at scale.
This is where technology, particularly modern VMS platforms, has evolved from administrative infrastructure into a strategic hub. When paired with data intelligence and emerging AI capabilities, these platforms help leaders:
As discussed on the Ardent Partners FOWX podcast, AI is no longer theoretical in workforce management. It is beginning to close long-standing gaps that were once managed through manual workarounds, fragmented systems, and institutional guesswork.
Healthcare organizations that treat contingent staffing as a temporary fix will continue to struggle. Those that treat it as a core component of workforce design will be better positioned to compete for talent, for financial sustainability, and for patient trust.
At Trio Workforce Solutions, we believe the future belongs to systems that balance flexibility with discipline, technology with human judgment, and efficiency with empathy for the clinicians delivering care.
The pandemic accelerated change, but it did not define the endpoint. The next phase of healthcare workforce transformation will be led by executives who recognize that resilience is built, not during crises, but through deliberate, strategic investment in how work gets done.