By Jim Teas, Chief Revenue Officer at Hallmark
Over the past few months, I’ve spent a lot of time with clients, partners, and our internal teams talking about what it actually takes to modernize locum tenens programs. I’ve seen where this works, and where it breaks. Whether health systems are considering their first VMS or expanding how they use one, success consistently comes down to preparation and stakeholder alignment. Across finance, clinical systems, and workforce operations, it’s a pattern I’ve seen play out time and again, regardless of the technology.
Today, I want to share a practical approach to evaluating where your company stands and how to put that insight into practice.
At the Hallmark Locums Summit, agencies and health systems came together and aligned on a few hard truths. Locum tenens are indispensable to modern healthcare delivery, but the industry often gets in its own way. Three challenges came up repeatedly across our conversations:
In Part 2 of this series, Michelle walked us through how centralizing locum tenens with a vendor management system (VMS) can address all three of these challenges. A VMS creates a single source of truth for position data, credentials, and provider information. It enables apples-to-apples rate comparisons and provides a shared language for tracking performance. By bringing all stakeholders onto one platform, a VMS helps streamline processes, reduce friction, and improve collaboration across teams.
Leading health systems are moving toward centralized, VMS-enabled locum programs because they bring structure, visibility, and accountability to a process that’s historically been fragmented. Centralization only works if finance, medical staff, physician recruitment, and department leaders are aligned. Getting there starts with an honest look at where your company stands today.
Before any organization can move toward a centralized, VMS-enabled locum tenens program, it needs a clear picture of its current state. I’ve seen leaders invest in the right technology and still struggle because the underlying processes and ownership weren’t aligned. That is exactly why we created the Locum Tenens Readiness Checklist. This tool helps hiring leaders, medical directors, and finance teams evaluate where they are currently and where they should focus first when preparing for centralization and VMS adoption. The checklist evaluates the core operational capabilities that support a centralized locum tenens program.
Work through each section and check the statements that reflect how your system actually operates today, not how you wish it would operate.
Key areas in the checklist include:
The checklist includes a scoring rubric to help you determine your maturity level, from foundational to advanced. Just as important, it helps quantify where inefficiencies are driving unnecessary cost, whether that’s premium labor, cycle times, or vendor variability.
The score itself isn’t the point. The real value comes from turning frustration with the status quo into a clear plan for action. Wherever your organization lands, this exercise creates a foundation for more structured conversations around change management, process improvement, and technology enablement.
For many health systems, the next step is aligning teams around the workflows and governance needed to support a centralized, VMS-enabled program. That requires coordination across hiring leaders and departments, along with clear ownership of locum tenens strategy and vendor relationships.
At the Hallmark Locums Summit, I saw a level of alignment and awareness that was encouraging. The industry knows what needs fixing. Translating that into meaningful change takes honest readiness work and commitment.
The goal is simple. Give your team a practical starting point and a way to turn insight into action. Because when this works, it doesn’t just improve operations. It ensures physicians and APPs are where they’re needed and patients get the care they deserve.
For organizations taking the next step, the right technology is key to making these changes stick. Hallmark’s healthcare-specific VMS brings structure to locum workflows, enabling flexible ordering across specialties, improving submission quality with standardized agency tools, and reducing back-and-forth through automation, including name clearing and privileging tracking. The result is a more streamlined, transparent, and scalable locum tenens program.
Interested in reading more about the locum tenens landscape? Explore the full Fixing Locum Tenens series, including Fixing Locum Tenens, Part 1: The Challenges and Part 2: Centralization.
