FocusOne Celebrates 15 Years!

As FocusOne Solutions celebrates a milestone birthday in our managed service program, I am reminiscent of our humble beginnings and proud of all that our team has accomplished in such a short time. Although incorporated in 2004, operations actually began in fall 2003, with only three employees. At that time, a managed services provider was a relatively new concept to healthcare and approximately only 15 percent of health systems had a MSP/VMS managing their staffing process. A short 15 years later, now 85 percent of health systems have a service like FocusOne. During this time, we’ve experienced tremendous growth and FocusOne is currently doing business in 40 states and has a powerful team of 39 employees!

So, what have we learned in the last 15 years?

  1. Be Adaptable. When FocusOne signed our first client in 2004, we primarily managed contract travel staff for nursing and allied health professionals only. As the needs of our clients have changed over the years, we’ve changed our program to adapt to their needs. Today, we provide services for contract, per diem, temp-to-perm, strike, EMR conversions, and payrolling services. We are also extremely proud of our direct hire search program and have helped 50 percent of our clients, in 2018 alone, find a full-time staff employee to work at their facility. In addition, we’re providing non-clinical staff to our clients, placing everyone from a barista working at the coffee cart to the CFO and CEO. We are excited to continue adapting to the needs of our clients for many years to come!
  2. Communication is Key! As healthcare and the staffing industry continue to change rapidly, we learned we must keep our clients informed of what is happening not only in their local market, but nationwide as well. We added the Client Relations Team a few years ago, with their primary responsibility being to visit our clients on a regular basis, provide analytics and reporting, discuss current trends in the staffing industry, and ensure our service team is exceeding expectations. They like to bring you food, too! Many of our clients also have regularly scheduled conference calls with their Operations Consultants, often weekly, bi-weekly or monthly, to discuss open requests, spend, forecasting of needs, projects, etc.
  3. Learn from Failure. Our program is not perfect and we’d be lying to you if we said we’ve never experienced a failure in our 15 years in business. But as the Dalai Lama notably said, “When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.” We’ve learned our lessons, made adjustments, and came back a stronger team as a result of our failures. Despite a few setbacks, we are proud to say that 95 percent of our clients renew their partnership with us year over year, with a few clients leaving as a result of a merger or acquisition into another healthcare system.
  4. Software Must Be User Friendly. Can you believe when FocusOne first began our program that we managed everything through email and kept track of our supplemental employee’s compliance documents on paper? We quickly learned that in order to stay competitive in this industry we would need a user-friendly software tool to manage the process. We partnered with a few clients back in 2007 to solicit their feedback and opinions and ta-da, FocusOne Connect was born! The benefit of owning the code to our software is we can add enhancements that are specific to our client’s needs. We’ve been working with our programmers and are excited to roll out some new enhancements in the coming months.
  5. Be a Good Partner. Whether that’s being a good partner to our clients, affiliate providers, or supplemental employees on assignment, it doesn’t matter. We know we’re not the largest managed services provider in the country, but we strive to be the BEST! I’m fortunate to work with a team of individuals who are passionate about the work they are doing and are truly the best in the industry. I’m extremely biased, but I’m confident you won’t find another team who can match their service. They pick up the phone when our partners call, they respond to emails quickly, and they are vested in providing quality staff to our client’s facilities each day.

To commemorate our 15th year in business, I’d like to share FocusOne’s newly released video. Please take a moment to watch it and find out why we believe we’re the best managed services provider in the country.

Mandy Hileman

Mandy has 14 years’ experience in healthcare staffing and throughout her tenure at FocusOne Solutions has worn many hats – Onsite Coordinator, Operations Consultant, Operations Manager and most recently as Director of Operations for the past 5 years. In her spare time, Mandy relaxes at the lake, enjoys spending time with friends and family, and shopping at Macy’s whenever she has the chance!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *