The healthcare industry faces a talent crisis of unprecedented scale. With aging populations...
Eighty-one percent of healthcare executives say that talent shortages will significantly impact their 2025 strategies, according to Deloitte’s latest Global Health Care Outlook. But for most leaders in the industry, that’s already reality. Hospitals are short on nurses. Credentialing delays are dragging out time-to-care. Burnout is driving early retirements, and regulatory shifts are increasing the risk of hiring missteps. The pressure is mounting from all sides.
These healthcare staffing challenges don’t exist in silos. Staffing gaps lead to operational breakdowns, compliance lapses create reputational risk, and fragmented hiring systems stall patient care. And yet, many healthcare organizations are still responding with short-term fixes to long-term problems.
It’s time for a shift in mindset. The most resilient healthcare organizations aren’t the ones with the most resources. They’re the ones with the clearest picture of their workforce—and the most integrated plan to build, protect, and adapt it. When the stakes are this high, confidence doesn’t come from guesswork. It comes from visibility, precision, and a partner who can help you eliminate blind spots.
Table of Contents
- Challenge #1: Clinical Talent Shortages and Burnout
- Challenge #2: Compliance Complexity Across States
- Challenge #3: Fragmented Hiring and Onboarding Workflows
- Challenge #4: Overreliance on Contingent Labor Without a Strategic Plan
- Challenge #5: Outdated Workforce Planning Models
Challenge #1: Clinical Talent Shortages and Burnout
Physician and nursing staff shortages and burnout are deeply intertwined, and unless both are addressed together, any short-term fix will fall short. To understand the scope of the challenge, it’s important to look at both the numbers and the human impact.
A Crisis of Supply and Demand
Healthcare organizations are facing a dangerous mismatch between staffing supply and patient demand. Nurses and other frontline clinicians are in critically short supply—a crisis driven by multiple compounding factors. Nursing school capacity is stretched thin, limiting the flow of new professionals into the field. At the same time, seasoned clinicians are exiting faster than they can be replaced, either through retirement or burnout-induced career changes.
And the gap is only expected to grow. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), physician demand is projected to continue outpacing supply, with a U.S. shortage of up to 86,000 physicians expected by 2036. As patient needs increase, care teams will be expected to do more—with fewer hands on deck.
The Human Cost of Burnout
Burnout is pervasive and persistent. According to the American Medical Association, 48.2% of physicians reported experiencing burnout in 2023. While that figure has declined from a post-COVID high of 56% in 2021 (and dropped slightly further in early 2024 to 45%) it still represents a nation-wide crisis affecting nearly half of all physicians.
Burned out clinicians are facing emotional exhaustion, disconnection from their work, and diminished capacity to deliver care. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated that burnout, but many of the underlying conditions that pre-date the pandemic—long shifts, understaffing, administrative burden—persist today.
What Healthcare Organizations Can Do
To improve healthcare employee retention, leaders should build partnerships with nursing schools and training programs, create clear pathways for internal mobility, and develop roles that extend clinician careers—such as transitioning experienced providers into educator or mentorship positions.
Employers also need to address burnout at the root. Offer more flexible scheduling, invest in mental health support, and redesign teams to share workloads more equitably. Workforce resilience starts with a steady pipeline, but it’s sustained through proactive care for the people already within it.
Challenge #2: Compliance Complexity Across States
As healthcare delivery models grow more dynamic and geographically dispersed, so too does the complexity of regulatory compliance. Organizations are being asked to do more with faster care across more jurisdictions, without sacrificing accuracy or accountability. For hiring teams, that’s a difficult line to walk.
A Shifting—and Uneven—Regulatory Landscape
Healthcare workforce regulations are evolving rapidly at both state and federal levels. Mandated staffing ratios, proposed Medicaid cuts, and new background screening requirements are just a few of the forces shaping how and where providers can operate. In some cases, these regulations are being challenged in court, further muddying the waters. A recent example includes a multi-state lawsuit against proposed federal staffing rules for nursing homes, highlighting just how volatile the regulatory environment has become.
For multi-state systems or those working with remote, mobile, or contracted clinicians, the challenge is amplified. Licensing and credentialing standards differ from state to state, and staying on top of changes requires constant vigilance.
The Operational Strain of Staying Compliant
This complexity doesn’t just affect legal departments. It creates day-to-day delays for HR, credentialing, and compliance teams. Hiring managers may be forced to wait days or weeks for verification steps, delaying time-to-care and leaving clinical gaps unfilled. In some cases, a hire may be onboarded in one state but left in limbo in another due to mismatched or outdated compliance protocols.
When staffing pipelines are already under strain, any delay is costly. And inconsistent application of compliance standards—especially across worker types like contractors or students—can introduce additional risk.
A Practical Framework for Multi-State Compliance
To keep pace, healthcare organizations need systems that help them remain compliant without losing speed or accuracy. That means documenting compliance policies across all operational states, establishing clear screening standards for every worker type, and investing in tools that can scale as rules shift. Designating compliance leads and proactively monitoring regulatory changes at both state and federal levels can also help avoid last-minute scrambles.
Ultimately, the organizations that can move fastest without cutting corners will be the ones best positioned to compete for talent and maintain quality care in a volatile environment.
Challenge #3: Fragmented Hiring and Onboarding Workflows
Many healthcare organizations have grown through mergers, rapid expansion, or necessity. While that growth is essential, it often leaves a patchwork of systems in its wake. Healthcare talent acquisition teams frequently maintain separate platforms for recruitment, credentialing, compliance, and HR. That fragmentation comes at a cost, especially when teams are racing to fill roles and meet care demands.
Disconnected Systems, Disjointed Experiences
In many healthcare systems, hiring still happens in silos. Recruiters, compliance officers, and onboarding teams each rely on different workflows—often housed in separate systems that don’t communicate well. Data is duplicated or lost. Timelines slip. Offers are made before verifications are complete, or onboarding begins before background checks are finalized.
Friction in the hiring process causes costly delays, inconsistent candidate experiences, and—at worst—compliance risk. This disconnection also slows the pace at which new hires can start delivering care, creating unnecessary gaps on already overburdened teams.
Disconnected The Cost of Manual, Reactive Processes
When workflows aren’t integrated, hiring becomes reactive. Teams spend time chasing down documents, verifying credentials manually, or redoing steps already completed elsewhere. For organizations working across multiple facilities or states, these inefficiencies scale quickly—slowing time-to-hire and increasing the risk of errors or omissions.
Candidates feel the impact, too. A lack of transparency around where they are in the process can lead to frustration and drop-off, especially in a competitive job market. Internal teams often lack visibility into hiring status, creating confusion and delays across departments.
Streamline Hiring With a More Integrated Workflow
Fixing fragmented workflows requires integrating the right systems, not adding more technology. Healthcare organizations can reduce administrative friction and improve candidate experience by centralizing credentialing, background screening, and onboarding into a shared platform. This process can also be automated by AI in the recruitment process to reduce errors and decrease time to hire. When each step flows logically into the next, delays shrink and visibility improves across teams.
Clear communication, consistent documentation, and standardized handoffs between departments are just as critical as tech upgrades. And with more healthcare professionals expecting a seamless hiring journey, the organizations that can deliver it will have a clear edge in both speed and satisfaction.
Challenge #4: Overreliance on Contingent Labor Without a Strategic Plan
Contingent labor has become a go-to solution for healthcare staffing gaps. But too often, it’s treated as a quick fix rather than a strategic asset. Without a clear plan for how these roles fit into the broader workforce architecture, organizations risk high costs, inconsistent care, and compliance vulnerabilities.
Short-Term Solutions, Long-Term Consequences
The use of travel nurses, contract clinicians, and per diem staff surged during the pandemic and continues to play a major role in filling vacancies. But relying too heavily on contingent labor without consistent screening, onboarding, or engagement practices creates disconnects between permanent teams and temporary workers.
These gaps can affect care quality, increase liability, and drive down morale—especially when contingent staff aren’t trained in an organization’s specific workflows or standards.
The Engagement Gap
Temporary workers often face a fragmented experience. They may not receive the same onboarding, communication, or support as full-time employees, leading to lower accountability and missed expectations. In some cases, they’re brought in under urgent timelines, without full credentialing or background verification processes in place.
This lack of parity not only introduces risk but also reinforces a transactional dynamic which ultimately undermines trust and consistency on clinical teams.
Integrate Contingent Talent Into Your Workforce Strategy
Healthcare organizations can strengthen outcomes by integrating contingent labor into their long-term workforce architecture. That means applying the same compliance and onboarding standards across all worker types, providing clear orientation, and aligning contingent assignments with clinical goals—not just coverage needs.
Strategic deployment of contingent staff can enhance flexibility, extend geographic reach, and bring specialized skills to the table. But to deliver those benefits, these workers need to be treated as true members of the care team from day one.
Challenge #5: Outdated Workforce Planning Models
Even as healthcare evolves, many organizations still rely on outdated approaches to workforce planning—based on historical norms, static ratios, or reactive hiring cycles. In today’s environment, that approach can’t keep up.
Rigid Models in a Fluid Environment
Healthcare is no longer confined to hospitals and fixed schedules. Telehealth, decentralized care, and hybrid clinical models demand staffing strategies that are agile, scalable, and responsive. Traditional staffing ratios and full-time-only frameworks make it harder to flex with changing patient volumes or care modalities.
These models also tend to overlook emerging roles such as digital workflow coordinators, virtual care support, or data specialists, that are critical to modern operations.
The Visibility Problem
Without a data-informed view of workforce trends, healthcare employers risk falling behind. It’s difficult to predict staffing shortfalls or succession gaps without systems that track retirements, turnover patterns, and regional labor dynamics. Many organizations also struggle to map their existing workforce’s skill sets against future needs.
This lack of visibility leads to reactive hiring, poor forecasting, and missed opportunities to upskill or reassign existing talent before the need becomes critical.
Build a Flexible, Future-Ready Workforce Plan
Effective workforce planning today starts with predictive analytics, skills mapping, and flexible role design. Organizations that use data to anticipate demand can shift from firefighting to future-proofing—building internal pipelines, designing roles for hybrid work, and aligning hiring with clinical strategy.
Instead of viewing labor constraints as fixed, leading systems are adapting their architecture: combining full-time, part-time, contract, and virtual roles into a cohesive whole. These healthcare talent acquisition models enable better work-life balance, support rapid scaling, and give healthcare systems the agility they need to thrive in a fast-changing landscape.
Don’t Let Staffing Gaps Call the Shots
Healthcare staffing challenges can slow you down. Missed verifications, fragmented workflows, and reactive hiring leave teams exposed and patients waiting.
The top health systems don’t wait for the next challenge. They prepare for it.
Make the right call. Talk to a Cisive expert to eliminate blind spots and build a workforce that’s ready for what’s next.
