New York City Health + Hospitals will continue to use an outside temp agency to manage the public hospital system’s travel personnel despite outside staff returning to pre-pandemic levels.
The system’s board of directors approved a $1.9 billion, three-year contract renewal with the Folsom, California-based medical staffing company, RightSourcing, to handle hiring through staffing agencies that the network has come to rely on, particularly since the onset of the pandemic in 2020.
RightSourcing administers contracts with staffing agencies, onboarding and technological support for timekeeping and provides the hospital system with a consolidated invoice from agencies. The process has helped the system manage record attrition and demand for temporary employees during the height of the pandemic as well as more mundane staffing needs for day-to-day absences, officials said at a recent board meeting where the contract was approved.
The company helped hire more than 22,000 temporary employees during its first contract, which expired in April. When the contract started in September 2020, the hospital system relied on it for a record level of temp staffing as the nursing shortage coincided with increased demand and competition with temporary staffing agencies.
Temporary full-time staff have returned to pre-pandemic levels for the first time, falling from a peak of over 3,600 in fiscal year 2022 to close to 1,800 in fiscal year 2025. Before approving the new contract, Health + Hospitals officials said having a centralized intermediary overseeing temporary staffing will help the system adjust to unexpected public health emergencies in the future, as well as ongoing vacancies, paid time-off and periodic family and medical leave. It will also help the hospital fill roles where trained talent is scarce, like radiologists, emergency and psychiatric nurses and lab technicians.
The contract was approved without going through competitive bidding as part of the traditional procurement process, in part because the infrastructure RightSourcing uses is so thoroughly ingrained in the system’s operations, said Yvette Villanueva, senior vice president of human resources.
Onboarding a new vendor would lead to major disruptions in patient care and broader administrative functions, she said. It would increase the time it takes to fill vacancies and orient new temporary staff, and would require expensive and “non-practicable” steps to establish new electronic scheduling and timekeeping systems, monitoring and reporting platforms, and new invoicing software.
RightSourcing was also selected because the company does not have its own employment agency branch that could create conflicts of interest. The firm is in use at other major health systems, including Mount Sinai, Hackensack Meridian Health, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Mayor Clinic.
