Tag: Hospitals

Hospitals continue to grapple with relentless financial pressures in 2025. While operating margins have stabilized, labor, supply and drug costs continue to soar. Many hospitals resort to workforce reductions to stay afloat, but this approach often backfires, leading to reduced capacity in revenue-generating departments, declining quality metrics, and eroded staff morale.   

There’s a smarter alternative: outsourcing surgical staffing. By addressing inefficiencies in one of a hospital’s highest-revenue departments, this strategy delivers significant cost savings while preserving—or even enhancing—productivity and quality.   

Surgical Services: An Overlooked Opportunity 

Surgical services typically generate over 60% of a hospital’s revenue, yet many hospitals maintain inefficient staffing models in these departments. Common issues include: 

• Underutilization of staff: Employed surgical staff often generate revenue for only 20–40% of their paid time.  

• Administrative burdens: OR directors and HR departments are bogged down by scheduling and compliance tasks.  

• Inconsistent credentialing: Compliance gaps jeopardize quality and regulatory standards.  

• Productivity constraints: Inflexible staffing mixes struggle to adapt to fluctuating surgical volumes. 

 By tackling these inefficiencies, hospitals can unlock substantial cost savings without compromising surgical capacity or patient outcomes. This isn’t just a concept—it’s a proven solution, as demonstrated by AP Health’s partnership with Memorial Health System, one of the nation’s largest public health systems. 

AP Health Saved Memorial $13 Million Since 2016 

In 2016, Memorial Health System (MHS) faced critical staffing challenges at Memorial Hospital West, including a severe shortage of surgical assistants, credentialing compliance issues, and overwhelming administrative demands on HR and OR leadership.  

Partnering with AP Health for surgical staffing services sparked a transformation that expanded system-wide: 

2016: Launched partnership at Memorial Hospital West 
2017: Expanded to Memorial Regional Hospital 
2018: Added Memorial Regional Hospital South and Memorial Hospital Pembroke 
2019: Completed system-wide implementation at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital 

From an initial team of 15 providers serving a single hospital, AP Health now has more than 50 credentialled providers staffing MHS surgeries across multiple facilities. This growth wasn’t driven by a corporate mandate, but by measurable results at each facility. The outcomes speak for themselves: 

• 35% cost savings across all five Memorial facilities 

• Over $13 million in total savings since 2016 

•  Increased surgical capacity, with no reductions in service 

• Enhanced productivity in the surgical department 

Why Outsource Surgical Staffing? 

For hospital leaders seeking alternatives to workforce reductions, outsourcing surgical staffing offers several advantages: 

Financial Flexibility: AP Health’s model converts fixed costs of Advanced Practice Provider (APP) employees into variable costs that scale with surgical volumes. This aligns clinical costs directly with revenue. 

High-Quality, Consistent Staff: Finding qualified surgical staff is difficult. Our exclusive focus on surgical staffing enables higher quality and consistency. We track surgeon preferences and provide them with preferred APPs in 95% of surgeries.  

Optimized Productivity: Many in-house surgical staff spend more than half their paid time idle between cases. Our ability to flex with case volume and schedule to minimize downtime dramatically increases productivity. 

Reduced Administrative Burden: Outsourcing streamlines credentialing, compliance, and scheduling, freeing OR and HR teams to focus on core priorities. 

Specialized Manpower for Robotic Surgery: As robotic-assisted procedures grow in complexity and prevalence, AP Health can supply cohesive, highly trained robotic surgical teams tailored to each facility’s specific platforms and specialties. 

Customized On-Call Teams: From neurosurgery to complex trauma, AP Health develops and deploys dedicated call teams with deep experience in high-acuity, specialized service lines—ensuring dependable coverage around the clock. 

The Bottom Line 

With financial pressures showing no signs of easing, hospitals need innovative strategies to thrive. Outsourcing surgical staffing delivers significant savings in a critical revenue center without sacrificing quality, capacity, or staff morale. By partnering with a proven provider like AP Health, hospitals can achieve fiscal stability while positioning their surgical services for long-term success. 

While cybersecurity has long been a focus of health system IT departments, it is now a top priority of the entire organization, from the board of directors on down. And for good reason. The threats are growing in both number and sophistication, with potentially devastating impacts. 

Healthcare Cyber Threats Continue to Grow 

Data breaches put health systems at risk for financial losses, reputational damage, loss of patient trust, and potential regulatory fines. 

• Healthcare has the highest average cost of a data breach of any industry: $10.93 million.

• Healthcare data breaches affected more than 89 million individuals in 2023.

• Healthcare is projected to suffer 2-3 times more cyberattacks in 2024 than other industries.

Monitoring cybersecurity is a top concern for business leaders, with 70 percent of organizations including a discussion of cybersecurity at all board meetings. Hospitals and health systems are increasing both cybersecurity oversight and spending. According to the American Hospital Association (AHA), some are spending up to 6% of their total IT budget on cyber defense.  

Technology Aids Cyber Defense 

More than half of cybersecurity leaders report increased budgets for cyber defense, with much of it for technological solutions. Like virtually every other industry, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown great promise for enhancing cybersecurity. However, AI is a double-edged sword in the cybersecurity landscape. On one hand, AI-powered tools enhance ability to detect and respond to threats in real-time, analyze vast amounts of data for potential vulnerabilities, and automate security processes. On the other hand, cybercriminals are leveraging AI to create more sophisticated phishing schemes, automate attacks, and exploit vulnerabilities at an unprecedented scale. 

AP Health’s Approach to Cybersecurity 

As a healthcare company providing clinical staffing in hospitals, we are acutely aware of the devastating impact cyber-attacks have had on our industry. AP Health has implemented a comprehensive strategy to protect our systems, data, and, by extension, the hospitals and health systems we serve. Our approach includes: 

1. Technological Infrastructure: We’ve invested in Barracuda Essentials, a sophisticated cybersecurity suite that includes firewalls, email gateway defense, impersonation protection, and cloud backup/archiving. This multi-layered defense system forms our first line of protection against cyber threats. 

2. Continuous Monitoring and Adaptation: Our team conducts ongoing assessments of our cybersecurity posture, staying abreast of emerging threats and evolving our defenses accordingly. 

3. Employee Awareness and Training: Recognizing that employees play a crucial role in cybersecurity, we’ve implemented a Security Awareness Training program. This equips our staff with the skills to identify and mitigate potential threats. 

We recognize that with a majority remote workforce and interconnected devices, our personal cybersecurity practices directly impact our professional security. Through our technology and training investments, we hope to create not only a rigorous defense against attacks, but a culture of cybersecurity. 

Cybersecurity is a Shared Responsibility 

AP Health is committed to being a trusted partner with our hospital partners to combat cyber threats. By continually enhancing our cybersecurity measures and fostering a culture of vigilance, we aim to contribute to a more secure and resilient healthcare ecosystem for all. 

In their ongoing quest for increased and sustainable profit margins, hospitals are looking at all aspects of the business in search of operational improvement. Outsourcing is an increasingly popular option. Research and Markets projects hospital outsourcing to have an annual compound growth rate of 14.4% (2023-2027). Outsourcing of clinical services is a key consideration – not just nursing, but also perioperative staff.

For health system and hospital leaders, weighing the decision to outsource clinical services comes down to a classic “make vs. buy” decision. This leads to examination of several key factors:

Cost: Outsourcing is typically seen as a premium service, at a premium price. However, comparing in-house vs. outsourced pay rates overlooks the hidden costs of employed staff, including benefits, sick days, attrition / turnover, and leave, as well as recruitment, continuing education and administrative costs.

At AP Health, the leading pure-play surgical assistant platform, in addition to relieving our hospital customers of administrative costs, we enable them to turn the fixed costs of Advanced Practice Provider (APP) employees into variable costs that can be scaled up or back to match changing surgical volumes and economic conditions. The ability to align direct clinical costs with revenue gives our partners greater flexibility in managing their ever-changing environment.

Quality: In-house clinical staff are generally assumed to provide more consistent and, as a result, higher quality patient care; this is simply not true.

At AP Health, we provide surgical facilities not only with flexibility, but also consistency of staffing. We track the preferences of the surgeons with whom we work. This means not only knowing how they like to operate, but which staff members they like to work with. Then, in dedicated effort to enable continuity and consistency, we work to provide them with their preferred APP. This coordination is something we measure and manage on an ongoing basis. The surgeons served by AP Health work with a preferred provider in 95% of the surgeries they perform.

Quality is also determined by the consistency of the care provided by practitioners over time. Unlike hospital recruiters who are tasked with hiring a wide range of clinical and non-clinical personnel, APP talent acquisition is our entire focus. And, because we are laser focused on recruiting and retaining these providers, we have worked to create a workplace where they want to stay and build their careers. We have been Great Place to Work Certified™ for the past four years. In this year’s survey, 92% of our employees rated AP Health a “great place to work.”

Efficiency: The effective utilization of resources is critical to enhancing operational efficiency and, therefore, maximizing hospital margins. A key component of that efficiency is staff utilization. Many in-house surgical staff spend more than half their paid time waiting for the next case, not generating revenue. In some hospitals, surgical staff are generating revenue just 20-40% of the time. At AP Health, our productivity reliably exceeds that due to our ability to flex up and down with case volume. Our APPs are methodically staffed to minimize downtime and facilitate optimal outcomes in the OR. Without sacrificing a commitment to the highest quality care and exemplary patient outcomes, we are able to provide the level of productivity that contributes directly to a facility’s bottom line.

In addition, AP Health’s high-performing APPs care for patients throughout the continuum of surgical care. This efficiency helps operating rooms generate additional revenue by reducing turnover time, increasing the number of cases performed, and boosting surgeon and patient satisfaction.

Control: Some hospital leaders are hesitant to outsource because they fear “losing control” of key clinical staff to an external entity. The reality is that outsourcing of clinical staff is not a transactional event where hospitals lose visibility or input into staff performance. Rather, it is a partnership with full transparency, accountability, and reporting throughout the relationship.

At AP Health, we provide our facility partners with full access to our extensive reporting metrics. This is one of the key reasons we have long-term and growing relationships with the facility partners we serve. For example, we signed our first client – Memorial Health System – more than seven years ago. We initially had 14 APPs serving Memorial. Today, we have 50 full-time APPs dedicated to the multiple facilities within the system. We also recently signed a new, multi-year contract that ensures continued growth with Memorial. Importantly, Memorial Health, across these several hospitals, has realized significant cost savings since the launch of its partnership with AP Health.

Hospitals considering “make vs. buy” decisions related to clinical staff should undertake a thorough and strategic assessment of their options. In the end, they’ll likely find that boosting operating margins is not just driven by cost reduction initiatives, but also by emphasizing quality, efficiency and productivity. Outsourcing clinical services, with the right partner(s), can produce significant financial, administrative, and surgeon and patient satisfaction benefits for surgical facilities without compromising the most essential mission – to provide the highest quality clinical care.