By Caton Brough
Workforce Solutions Executive, Prolink
Too many hospitals, not enough talent.
We may sound like broken records in healthcare staffing, but the story has largely remained the same for the past decade or so, even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Clinician shortages, high vacancy rates, and persistent burnout have long challenged hospital leaders. During the pandemic, the travel nurse market surged, but now the pendulum has swung back.
The demand for travel nurses has dropped sharply, down nearly 37% in 2024 according to Staffing Industry Analysts. Revenue in the segment has fallen from a pandemic high of $42.7 billion to $19.5 billion in 2025, per S&P Global. Hospitals are tightening budgets, relying less on high-cost contingent labor, and focusing more on retention and workforce alignment.
But that doesn’t mean the workforce crisis has passed. The U.S. is still projected to face a shortfall of nearly 300,000 nurses by 2025. Vacancy rates in most hospitals still hover around 10 to 16 percent. Burnout remains high. And the structure of the labor market continues to shift. In response, more and more health systems took on Managed Service Provider (MSP) relationships with staffing firms in hopes that an exclusive partnership would lead to lower costs and higher fill rates. But have those promises been fulfilled, especially by the biggest players in the market? I’m not so sure. Let me explain.
How MSPs work in healthcare staffing
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of an MSP, here’s a quick primer: When a staffing company accepts an MSP partnership with a health system, they become the sole workforce partner for that organization. They manage the entire workforce program, from supplier engagement and billing to market intelligence, onboarding, and talent curation. Ideally, this leads to greater operational efficiency and cost savings. But an MSP partnership requires commitment from both sides. What if that relationship becomes lopsided?
You might be asking yourself how that could happen. After all, both sides of the MSP agreement are holding each other accountable. But the model relies heavily on trust. Trust that the MSP's rate recommendations are objective, that their supplier management is equitable, and that their data insights are accurate and unbiased—specifically that the analysis and bill rates provided by the MSP partner represent a clear, accurate picture of the market. And when a staffing provider is already overcommitted as an MSP, that might not always be the case. This happens more often than you might think.
Take this real-world scenario. Dozens of hospitals in a single region are serviced by the same supplier-led MSP. The provider doesn’t increase its clinician pipeline; it just redistributes talent. And where does the talent go? To the hospital paying the highest bill rate. The others are told the market is tight, demand is high, or a competing hospital is paying more, and that they now need to inflate their bill rates to fill their gaps.
That isn’t partnership. It’s a playbook. And it’s profitable for one party.
How to choose your health system’s MSP partner
That’s why selecting the right MSP partner matters as much as the decision to implement an MSP in the first place. Because an overcommitted vendor isn’t just slow to deliver. They can actively distort your visibility, reduce your negotiating power, and inflate your spend.
I don’t mean to suggest that an MSP is the wrong way to go with your health system’s staffing program—just the opposite. MSPs work, and they work well. But choosing the right staffing partner is just as important as setting up the MSP itself. Choose a partner that’s overcommitted, especially in your region, and you could be setting yourself up for more headaches than before.
At Prolink, we built our model to do the opposite.
We are a privately held, family-owned business, and we keep our client portfolio lean by design. That means no overcommitment, no rate manipulation, and no diluted performance. With our proprietary technology platform, we give you real-time analytics, transparent market data, and full visibility into supplier performance. You will always know how your program is performing and where your spend is going.
You will also get a hands-on team that does not disappear after go-live. We partner with you at every step, refining your rate strategy, improving your talent mix, and helping you build a sustainable workforce model that works today, not just in theory.
We also go the extra mile to give you the clearest possible view of the market. Our exclusive technology helps you take total control of your workforce mix and adjust your rates and distribution in real time. You’ll get a team of hands-on workforce experts that will guide you in the right direction to set you up for success, and we don’t overcommit. We don’t show you artificially inflated bill rates or tweak our data to steer you in one direction or another. With our analytics, what you see is what you get. Unlike some of the bigger players in the staffing world, we’re a privately held, family-run business. We put your long-term success first, and when you succeed, we succeed too.
My advice? Before entering or renewing any MSP agreement, ask one simple question: how many other hospitals in my region are they already committed to?
Because when it comes to selecting a staffing partner, who you don’t choose matters just as much as who you do.
