As 2025 comes to a close, hospital leaders reflected on a year defined by thin margins, rising labor costs, and continued workforce volatility. While staffing shortages remained a challenge, many hospitals discovered that the most significant financial losses were not caused by a lack of clinicians alone — but by how their workforce operations were managed.
Across health systems nationwide, the same workforce mistakes surfaced repeatedly. The difference between hospitals that struggled and those that stabilized operations came down to visibility, control, and execution. Here are the top five hospital workforce management mistakes that cost millions in 2025 — and how high-performing systems fixed them.
1. Disconnected Contingent Labor Systems
What Happened:
Many hospitals continued to manage locum tenens, travel nurses, per diem staff, and internal float pools across spreadsheets, emails, and multiple vendor portals. This fragmentation slowed decision-making and created blind spots across departments.
The Impact:
Disconnected systems led to duplicate work, inconsistent rates, delayed approvals, and missed coverage — all of which increased labor costs and administrative burden. The financial consequences of unmanaged contingent labor became especially clear in recent years. According to the American Hospital Association, hospital contract labor expenses increased by 258% between 2019 and 2022, highlighting how fragmented workforce processes and reactive staffing models significantly inflate costs when visibility and controls are lacking.
What High-Performing Systems Did Differently:
Leading hospitals consolidated all contingent labor into a single system of record, allowing leaders to view requests, approvals, utilization, and spend in one place. By centralizing workforce operations, these systems reduced administrative friction, improved fill speed, and regained control over labor costs — turning contingent staffing from a reactive expense into a manageable, strategic resource.
2. Lack of Centralized Vendor Oversight
What Happened:
Without centralized vendor management, hospitals relied heavily on legacy agency relationships or manual outreach. This limited competition and made it difficult to compare rates or performance objectively.
The Impact:
Vendor bias and rate inflation drove up labor spend, while inconsistent accountability made it harder to improve outcomes.
What High-Performing Systems Did Differently:
High-performing organizations adopted a vendor-neutral approach that gave all staffing partners equal access while providing leadership with transparent data on rates, fill performance, and responsiveness. This created healthier competition and better pricing — without disrupting existing relationships.
3. Manual Credentialing and Compliance Tracking
What Happened:
Credentialing and compliance processes were still handled manually in many hospitals, tracked through emails and spreadsheets disconnected from staffing workflows.
The Impact:
Manual processes delayed clinician start dates, increased compliance risk, and placed unnecessary strain on internal teams.
What High-Performing Systems Did Differently:
Leading hospitals automated credentialing and compliance tracking, ensuring providers were cleared faster and audit readiness was maintained. Automation reduced delays, minimized risk, and freed staff to focus on strategic workforce planning instead of paperwork.
“Entering timesheets in Ringo is easy and transparent. I have clear visibility into all the rates and hours for the providers. This feature mitigates errors and alerts me to any potential discrepancies.” — Christine Thomson, Nationwide Anesthesia Services, Inc.
4. Inability to Forecast Labor Spend
What Happened:
Many hospitals only saw labor costs after invoices were submitted — once budgets had already been exceeded.
The Impact:
Lack of real-time visibility made it difficult for finance and operations leaders to forecast spend or plan proactively, resulting in budget overruns and reactive decision-making.
What High-Performing Systems Did Differently:
High-performing hospitals relied on real-time workforce analytics to track labor spend by department, role, vendor, and time period. This visibility enabled better forecasting, scenario modeling, and smarter allocation of resources before costs escalated.
5. Reactive Staffing Instead of Workforce Planning
What Happened:
Staffing decisions were often made in crisis mode, responding to last-minute gaps rather than planning for predictable demand cycles, retirements, or seasonal trends.
The Impact:
Reactive staffing drove premium rates, increased burnout among permanent staff, and disrupted continuity of care.
What High-Performing Systems Did Differently:
Successful hospitals shifted from reactive staffing to workforce optimization, using historical data and forward-looking insights to plan contingent labor strategically. Locum tenens and temporary staff were used intentionally to support permanent teams, not as emergency fixes.
Why Ringo Made the Difference
Across all five challenges, a consistent theme emerged: hospitals that gained control over labor costs invested in vendor-neutral workforce infrastructure rather than more staff or more agencies.
Ringo helped high-performing systems by providing:
- A centralized, vendor-neutral VMS for all contingent labor
- Real-time visibility into labor spend, utilization, and performance
- Automated credentialing and compliance workflows
- Transparent vendor comparisons to reduce bias and rate inflation
By unifying workforce data and workflows, Ringo enabled hospital leaders to move from reactive staffing to informed, strategic decision-making.
What Hospital Leaders Learned in 2025
As the year is wrapping up, one lesson is becoming clear: hospitals did not lose millions because of workforce shortages alone — they lost millions due to fragmented systems, manual processes, and lack of visibility.
According to the American Hospital Association, labor accounted for more than 50% of hospital operating expenses in 2025, and systems without centralized workforce management struggled to control those costs despite stabilization in staffing levels.
The systems that stabilized operations and controlled labor costs treated workforce management as a strategic function — supported by technology built specifically for healthcare.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Ready to see how Ringo can help your organization avoid these costly workforce mistakes?
Schedule a demo to learn how Ringo’s vendor-neutral VMS brings clarity, control, and confidence to hospital workforce management.
