Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have long played a role in healthcare staffing—but by the end of 2025, their role had fundamentally changed. What was once viewed as an administrative layer focused on rate cards and approvals evolved into a strategic workforce function centered on experience, integration, and performance.
For hospital workforce leaders, procurement teams, staffing partners, and MSP program directors, this shift became unavoidable. Labor remained the single largest operating expense for health systems, while burnout, turnover, and staffing volatility continued to threaten care delivery. In this environment, MSPs were no longer judged by cost control alone—but by how effectively they enabled transparency, culture, and data-driven decision-making.
According to the American Hospital Association, labor accounted for more than 50% of total hospital operating expenses, making workforce management the most critical financial lever for healthcare organizations. At the same time, contract labor costs increased by 258% between 2019 and 2022, highlighting how unmanaged contingent labor and fragmented staffing processes drive unsustainable spend.
These pressures exposed the limitations of traditional MSP models that relied on manual workflows, siloed vendor data, and reactive staffing decisions.
What happened:
Many healthcare organizations historically treated MSPs as transactional gatekeepers—focused on approvals, timesheets, and invoices rather than workforce outcomes.
Why it mattered:
When MSPs lacked real-time insight into staffing demand, utilization, and vendor performance, hospitals were forced to react to workforce gaps instead of planning for them.
How Ringo helps:
Ringo enables MSPs and hospitals to operate from a single, centralized platform purpose-built for healthcare. By unifying contingent labor requests, approvals, and reporting, Ringo transforms MSPs from administrators into strategic partners with visibility across the entire workforce.
What happened:
Locum physicians, travel nurses, and agency staff were frequently onboarded through disconnected systems, leaving them isolated from permanent teams and excluded from standard workflows.
The impact:
This lack of integration contributed to clinician burnout, inconsistent workflows, and higher turnover—particularly in high-acuity service lines and rural or underserved settings where workforce stability is already fragile.
How Ringo helps:
Ringo streamlines onboarding, credentialing, and communication across all contingent workers within a single, healthcare-first platform. By ensuring providers are fully integrated into hospital workflows from day one, Ringo reduces friction, improves transparency, and helps MSPs deliver a more inclusive and consistent workforce experience—supporting both clinician satisfaction and continuity of patient care.
As highlighted in Ringo’s analysis of healthcare staffing trends, vendor-neutral technology plays a critical role in improving workforce integration and long-term sustainability.
What happened:
Hospitals struggled to objectively compare staffing agencies due to inconsistent data, manual reporting, and limited performance tracking across locum tenens, travel, and contingent labor vendors.
Why it mattered:
Without standardized analytics, procurement and MSP leaders lacked leverage. Vendor bias, rate inflation, and inconsistent quality persisted because decisions were often based on relationships or incomplete information rather than performance data.
According to a Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) workforce survey, a majority of healthcare organizations reported that they lack real-time visibility into labor costs and staffing performance, making it difficult to manage contract labor spend or evaluate vendor effectiveness proactively.
This lack of visibility contributed directly to higher contingent labor costs and reduced accountability across staffing partners—especially as contract labor usage remained elevated.
How Ringo helps:
Ringo delivers real-time, vendor-neutral analytics that allow MSPs and hospitals to compare fill rates, time-to-fill, spend, and compliance performance across all vendors in one centralized platform. By standardizing workforce data, Ringo eliminates guesswork and enables procurement and MSP leaders to negotiate from a position of insight, improve accountability, and drive better workforce outcomes—without favoring any single agency.
As outlined in Ringo’s perspective on healthcare staffing challenges, visibility and data are foundational to addressing workforce shortages and controlling labor costs.
By late 2025, a clear pattern emerged: vendor-neutral MSP models supported by healthcare-first technology consistently outperformed agency-owned models.
Vendor-neutral MSPs empowered by platforms like Ringo helped organizations:
Rather than driving volume, these MSPs focused on outcomes—aligning incentives with hospital performance, not agency margins.
As the year wrapped up, workforce leaders recognized that MSP success was no longer about enforcing rules—it was about enabling clarity and control.
According to Kaufman Hall, hospitals that leveraged real-time workforce and labor analytics were better equipped to stabilize operations and manage labor risk, while organizations relying on delayed or fragmented data remained reactive to staffing challenges.
Hospitals that stabilized operations and reduced labor risk treated MSPs as strategic workforce partners, invested in healthcare-specific, vendor-neutral technology, prioritized clinician experience alongside cost control, and used real-time data to plan—not panic.
The modern healthcare MSP is no longer just a middleman. It is a connector—linking hospitals, staffing partners, and clinicians through transparency, culture, and actionable data.
As workforce challenges persist, organizations that adopt technology-enabled, vendor-neutral MSP models will be best positioned to control costs, support clinicians, and sustain performance.
Ready to see how Ringo can support a modern, vendor-neutral MSP strategy?
Schedule a demo to discover how Ringo helps healthcare organizations simplify contingent workforce management, improve visibility, and make smarter staffing decisions.