What will healthcare staffing look like in 2026?
Expect a bigger role for locum tenens, a rise in APP usage, and faster onboarding with tech-powered credentialing.
Welcome to Locums Digest, Locumpedia’s free bi-weekly roundup of industry news and trends that helps locum tenens agencies and healthcare facilities make informed business decisions.
In this edition: Vista Staffing outlines the top trends healthcare staffing professionals should be aware of as 2026 approaches. Top of the list? The projected shortage of 4 million healthcare professionals is causing facilities to rethink their long-term strategies. That means more locum tenens, greater APP usage, and a greater emphasis on new tech.
Also in Digest 105: Why more organizations are using locums to future-proof their workforce, how physician well-being fits into retention strategies, and what makes the best recruiters stand out. Plus, the latest on AI in healthcare, from ambient tools in ambulatory care to the growing case for smaller, domain-specific language models.
Navigating 2026: Trends That Will Reshape Locum Tenens and Hospital Staffing
November 11 | Vista Staffing
As hospitals brace for a projected shortfall of 4 million healthcare workers in 2026, locum tenens has stepped into the spotlight as a core staffing strategy. Burnout, retirements, and capped training slots are driving widespread vacancies, especially in states like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Clinician preferences are shifting, too. Many are opting for gig-style roles over traditional employment, forcing hospital administrators to rethink their approach to coverage, retention, and well-being.
With specialties like emergency medicine, psychiatry, and anesthesiology leading demand, hospitals are weaving locum tenens into long-term workforce planning. Flexible assignments now help balance seasonal surges, improve work-life balance, and keep revenue flowing. Meanwhile, APPs are bridging the access gap left by retiring physicians, particularly in primary care and chronic disease management.
Tech is also making waves, streamlining credentialing and onboarding with AI, while multi-state licensure compacts and telehealth expansion let clinicians work across borders. As staffing challenges intensify, one thing is clear: The hospitals that embrace hybrid models, prioritize clinician well-being, and partner strategically with staffing agencies will be better equipped to flourish in 2026 and beyond.
La Vida Locum
Locums as a Financial Strategy: Six Ways Temporary Providers Drive Long-Term Value
November 20 | CompHealth
Healthcare organizations may be overlooking the full financial impact of locum tenens. Strategically deployed, locums can significantly strengthen a facility’s economic health by preserving revenue, maintaining patient volumes, and curbing costly staff turnover. Filling gaps with locum providers sustains essential referral streams and supports high-margin procedures, keeping full-time specialists focused on what they do best. For hospitals, this means maximizing billing opportunities while minimizing revenue loss from provider vacancies and out-of-network referrals.
Locums also play a critical role in protecting patient relationships. Quick placement ensures continuity of care, which supports higher satisfaction scores and lowers the risk of patient attrition. Equally important, locums help reduce physician burnout, offering relief to overextended teams and helping lower long-term recruitment and onboarding costs.
With doctor turnover and staffing shortages at elevated levels, locums are proving to be a vital lever for financial resilience and workforce sustainability.
Why Locum Coverage Is Your Best Bet During Peak Employee Turnover
November 12 | Cross Country
When a physician leaves during peak demand periods like flu season or the holiday rush, the financial fallout hits fast and hard. Between lost revenue, employee attrition, and disrupted patient flow, a single vacancy can cost hospitals over $130,000 per month. In high-revenue departments, those losses can balloon to two or three times the provider’s annual salary. Yet many organizations still overlook a cost-effective solution that’s already within reach: locum tenens.
Locum providers offer immediate, flexible coverage that keeps doors open, patients seen, and staff supported. Rather than overloading permanent teams or losing billable work, facilities using locums can stabilize care delivery while avoiding the burnout spiral. When you factor in recruitment costs, onboarding delays, and turnover risk, the daily rate for a locum is often the smarter financial choice.
Hospitals can get ahead of seasonal surges by building locum coverage into staffing plans early.
How Health Systems Are Future-Proofing Their Provider Workforce
November 13 | Becker’s Hospital Review
Staffing shortages aren’t going anywhere, but leading health systems are rewriting the playbook to stay ahead. At Becker’s 2025 CEO + CFO Roundtable, execs from BJC Medical Group and RWJBarnabas Health shared how they’re adapting to a workforce where two new grads are often needed to replace one retiring specialist. They believe facilities should rethink staffing models, move as a system, and build workforce pipelines years before needs arise.
Both organizations credit service line structures and interim locum partnerships as key to weathering coverage gaps. RWJBarnabas Health used Medicus bridge coverage to stabilize a radiology team in flux, while BJC Medical Group leaned on cross-market resource sharing. These models provided the agility needed to avoid care disruptions and manage clinical backlogs.
Meanwhile, retention hinges on listening to clinicians. Transparent leadership, burnout prevention, and academic partnerships are helping these systems strengthen loyalty and align training with long-term needs. The message was clear: workforce stability takes strategy, not guesswork, and those planning upstream will be best positioned to thrive.
Locum Leaders
Thomas Lanvers Tapped to Lead Locumsmart Amid Record Growth
November 6 | Locumsmart
Locumsmart has named Thomas Lanvers as its new president. Since joining the company in 2023 as SVP, Lanvers has earned a reputation for tightening vendor partnerships and boosting both sales and customer success efforts. His promotion signals Locumsmart’s ongoing push to innovate and scale at a time when both hospitals and agencies are feeling the squeeze.
Lanvers steps into the role during a breakout year for the platform, which saw record growth in 2025. With nearly 20 years of locum staffing experience, including senior roles at both CompHealth and its parent company, CHG Healthcare, he brings deep industry know-how to the VMS space. One of his first major initiatives as president will be leading the Locumsmart Education Conference in Nashville.
As hospital systems look for ways to cut costs without cutting care, Lanvers sees technology as a critical solution. His focus for now is helping partners on both sides of the staffing equation do more with less while keeping patient access front and center.
Why Smarter Credentialing Is Key to Speeding Up Staffing
November 5 | LinkedIn
At the recent MSO Summit hosted by LocumTenens.com, healthcare credentialing professionals examined the operational and financial impact of slow provider onboarding. With clinical vacancies mounting, many facilities face credentialing delays of 60 to 90 days, costing hospitals tens of thousands in lost revenue. Fragmented workflows can also drive credentialing costs as high as $8,000 per clinician, according to discussion leaders.
Speaker Brooke Thompson noted that provider onboarding expectations are evolving. Clinicians increasingly seek transparency, real-time communication, and human support throughout the credentialing process. While the summit covered emerging technologies such as digital credentialing platforms, AI automation, and even blockchain, attendees highlighted the need for greater cross-department collaboration and process standardization as a more immediate solution.
LocumTenens.com representatives discussed ongoing initiatives to address these issues, including NCQA-certified workflows and new tools designed to streamline provider onboarding. Attendees emphasized that reducing friction in credentialing could be critical to maintaining care continuity amid ongoing workforce shortages.
Hire Power
Why a Well-Being Strategy Is a Competitive Advantage
October 31 | KevinMD
Recruitment packages may check the boxes on salary and CME, but today’s physicians are asking deeper questions. For example, they want to know about evening coverage, call schedules, and the amount of administrative work they’ll have to wade through. If health systems can’t answer those questions with clarity, candidates will walk. Or worse, they’ll burn out and leave medicine entirely.
That’s why provider mental health can’t live in a side committee. It needs to be embedded in your organizational DNA. Dr. Jennifer Shaer, a chief wellness officer, argues that effective strategies focus on system design rather than on individual resilience. That means tracking burnout and engagement, integrating frontline feedback, and giving local teams power to improve workflows.
The bottom line is that employee well-being is a litmus test for your leadership values. When physicians feel supported, they stay, grow, and deliver better care. And that’s good for everyone.
Why the Best Recruiters Teach Instead of Sell
October 22 | LinkedIn
Physician inboxes are flooded with boilerplate pitches: “Great salary! Amazing bonus! Call now!” But today’s top recruiters are focused on providing value instead. In a market where doctors receive 15 to 20 recruiter contacts a month, the standout approach isn’t another job ad. It’s context. The recruiters who win are the ones who educate.
The model is to spend half your time recruiting and half sharing insights that actually help physicians make smarter decisions. For example, consider compensation trends, market shifts, practice models, and regulatory changes. This education-first strategy builds trust with passive candidates, the 70% of physicians not actively job hunting but open to the right opportunity.
Recruiters should pick a niche, become the go-to expert in it, and be someone job seekers rely on for career guidance. In this new era, those who teach win.
Making the Rounds
Here’s How Smart Systems Are Responding to Understaffing
November 4 | American Medical Association
New data from the AMA confirms what many in the field already feel: when healthcare teams are short-staffed, burnout spikes. Nearly half of physicians surveyed reported working with incomplete teams at least 25% of the time, and those doctors were twice as likely to experience work-related stress. Across specialties, the strain is contributing to reduced clinical hours and rising intent to leave the profession entirely.
Instead of staffing reactively, some health systems are redesigning care teams to reduce inefficiencies and better support clinicians. From Confluence Health’s medical assistant training to Geisinger’s pharmacy-driven prior auth team, the solutions are practical and working.
Addressing burnout is fundamentally about operational design. Staffing stability, better tech, and empowered teams make the real difference in keeping physicians engaged, effective, and willing to stay.
Why Healthcare’s AI Future Lies in Small Language Models, Not Bigger Ones
November 6 | Healthcare IT News
Healthcare doesn’t need bigger AI models. It needs smarter, smaller ones trained on the right data. According to Fawad Butt, former chief data officer at Kaiser Permanente and now CEO of Penguin Ai, large language models like ChatGPT-5 may have hit a ceiling due to overreliance on recycled internet data that lacks the precision needed for healthcare workflows. Instead, small language models trained on proprietary enterprise data deliver faster, cheaper, and more accurate performance on real-world tasks.
Butt argues that healthcare-specific SLMs are built for business-critical use cases such as prior authorization, HCC risk coding, and claims processing, which are areas where LLMs routinely fail. SLMs require fewer resources and can run on lighter infrastructure, making them practical for enterprise environments. For health IT leaders, the key is to leverage their own internal data and pilot focused, measurable solutions within a 30- to 90-day window.
Don’t scale up, and sharpen your focus instead. The real AI advantage in healthcare lies in domain-specific expertise.
AI Adoption Gains Momentum in Ambulatory Care
November 13 | Medical Economics
A recent survey of 887 healthcare professionals reveals that AI is quickly becoming a staple in ambulatory care, with half of practices now using at least one AI tool. Front-runners like Sunoh.ai are proving especially impactful, with 72% of AI users reporting documentation support that saves up to four hours daily. Automated fax sorting is also delivering time-saving wins, reinforcing AI’s role as a frontline solution to administrative overload.
Beyond documentation, the next wave of adoption targets patient communication and record retrieval. Tools like healow Genie and Prisma AI are making strides, streamlining front-desk operations and accelerating clinical data collection. More than half of respondents plan to expand AI use into revenue cycle management, highlighting expectations for improved accuracy and financial performance.
Emerging innovations like smart glasses and ambient computing are also generating buzz, with 76% of respondents saying these tools could enhance care delivery. While implementation challenges remain, it’s clear that AI is a present-day strategy for operational efficiency and better care.
Sponsored Content
How Hospitals Can Fix Credentialing Bottlenecks
November 4 | OnCall Solutions
Credentialing delays are a major barrier to workforce optimization. According to a 2025 MedWave report, credentialing can take up to 120 days, costing hospitals $50,000 per physician in lost revenue and administrative burden. Incomplete applications, outdated systems, and multi-state licensing hurdles are the biggest culprits. Staffing shortages only add to the backlog, leaving hospitals scrambling to cover shifts and patients facing longer wait times.
To accelerate onboarding, hospitals are turning to three proven solutions: digital credentialing platforms, the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact (IMLC), and partnerships with staffing agencies that provide pre-credentialed clinicians. Platforms like Modio Health cut approval times by 30%, while IMLC speeds up multi-state licensing in days. And when paired with flexible locum coverage, staffing agencies help bridge gaps and prevent clinician burnout.
Credentialing must be fully integrated, automated, transparent, and team-aligned. For healthcare staffing professionals, faster credentialing can be a strategic advantage in a fiercely competitive talent market.
How Locum Tenens Strengthens Oncology Staffing Amid Growing Shortages
March 6 | Cancer CarePoint
With cancer incidence rising and survivorship improving, oncology staffing demands are outpacing physician supply, leading to treatment delays, care disruptions, and increased provider burnout. Forecasts project a shortfall of over 2,300 medical oncologists by 2025, and while APPs help, gaps persist across specialized cancer fields. For healthcare staffing professionals, long-term solutions require flexible strategies.
Locum tenens offers a fast, cost-effective way to bridge these gaps. As demand climbs, a robust pipeline of vetted locum oncologists and clinical support staff is stepping in to support patient care. These providers help maintain continuity, reduce administrative burden, and offer scalability aligned to patient volume.
Beyond filling seats, locum tenens partnerships with oncology-specific firms ensure credentialed, specialty-matched clinicians are deployed quickly and efficiently. As staffing shortages deepen, healthcare leaders are embracing locum tenens as a strategic lever for delivering uninterrupted, high-quality oncology care.
