This mini-blog series explores the eight most common pain points driving inefficiency, overspend, and burnout across healthcare organizations — and how Kimedics helps transform workforce chaos into Total Staffing Intelligence.
The Locum Dependancy Trap
Every hospital uses locums. But few truly understand what they’re spending — or why.
Locum tenens are meant to fill coverage gaps. Yet for many healthcare organizations, they’ve become a permanent fixture — and a costly one. Without full visibility into usage, rates, and performance, locum costs spiral quietly in the background.
Soon, it's too late to rein them in.
The Challenge: Short-Term Fix, Long-Term Cost
When coverage gaps arise, it’s easy to lean on locums. They offer flexibility and speed — but also premium rates and opaque billing.
Most organizations lack a clear process for strategically managing locum use, so what begins as a temporary solution turns into an unsustainable habit.
Common warning signs include:
- Last-minute bookings that drive up agency markups
- Multiple vendors with no standardized contracts or rate tracking
- Overlapping spend on locums when internal providers could have filled the shifts
- Limited visibility into utilization by site, specialty, or timeframe
Without data, locum decisions are reactive — driven by urgency, not strategy.
“We’re spending millions on locums, but don’t have visibility into whether that spend is efficient—or avoidable.”
— VP of Operations, Multi-Site Physician Group
The Impact: When Flexibility Becomes Dependence
What starts as a coverage safety net often becomes a major budget driver:
- Cost creep: Each untracked shift inflates overall staffing costs.
- Agency dependency: Teams default to familiar vendors rather than comparing value.
- Misaligned incentives: Finance, ops, and clinical teams lack shared KPIs to reduce external reliance.
In many organizations, locums represent 10–20% of total staffing spend — but nearly all the volatility.
That volatility erodes profitability, disrupts continuity of care, and prevents meaningful workforce planning.
The Opportunity: Smarter Mix, Better ROI
Reducing locum costs isn’t about eliminating external providers — it’s about strategic balance.
With the right data, healthcare organizations can:
- Benchmark rates across agencies and specialties to ensure consistency.
- Optimize internal utilization before turning to external coverage.
- Forecast coverage needs to plan ahead instead of scrambling.
- Evaluate vendor performance based on fulfillment rates, costs, and credentialing speed.
When every locum shift, rate, and invoice is visible in one place, organizations regain control — and uncover significant savings.
How Kimedics Helps
Kimedics helps healthcare organizations take control of locum spend through unified visibility and data-driven decision-making.
- Centralized locum management for all agencies and provider types
- Transparent rate tracking across contracts and specialties
- Real-time reporting on utilization, fulfillment, and spend
- Built-in analytics to identify opportunities for internal coverage and savings
With Kimedics, teams can see every external shift in context — its cost, its alternative, and its impact.
The result: Less dependency, more predictability, and smarter staffing decisions.
You can’t control what you can’t see. We can help you see everything.
Break the Locum Cycle
Locums should be your safety net, not your strategy.
- Kimedics gives you the data and tools to manage external staffing proactively.
- We help reduce overspend while improving coverage and continuity.
Ready to see how visibility transforms locum management?
Request a Demo
Learn more about Kimedics
Kimedics is a provider utilization management solution. We help healthcare organizations reduce scheduling complexity. For more information, book a demo or email kimedics@kimedics.com