Margins in healthcare staffing have always been tight. The past few years have made them tighter. Post-pandemic contraction in key segments, health systems building out internal staffing capabilities, and clients consolidating vendor relationships have all added pressure to a business that doesn’t have a lot of slack to absorb it.
In that kind of environment, firms scrutinize the obvious cost centers. What’s less obvious is that background screening, typically filed away as a compliance function, is often one of the more consequential levers in the operating model. The firms managing it deliberately tend to look different from the ones running it on autopilot.
At Universal Background Screening (UBS), healthcare and healthcare staffing make up the majority of our business. We’ve worked with some of the largest firms in the industry for over a decade. What that vantage point shows us is consistent: invisible inefficiencies in the screening process have a way of quietly compounding into meaningful margin loss, and most firms don’t realize how much until they change something.
The Waste Already Built Into the Process
A useful question to ask your team: how many times has a clinician in your pipeline completed a TB test, a physical exam, or an immunization titer in the past two years? And of those, how many were genuinely necessary?
For most healthcare staffing firms, the honest answer is uncomfortable. Not because anyone made a bad call, but because the path of least resistance, when credential data lives in a PDF or inside a system that can’t communicate with anything else, is to reorder. It’s faster in the moment. It avoids having to track down whether something is still valid. It also costs money that didn’t need to be spent.
Multiply that across hundreds or thousands of clinicians, and you’re looking at a meaningful line item. Layer on the candidate frustration from being asked to redo things they just completed, and you’re also losing goodwill with the people you need to retain and place quickly.
This isn’t a policy problem, in most cases. Firms know credential reuse is theoretically possible. The issue is that the underlying architecture doesn’t support it. When screening is designed to produce a monolithic report rather than discrete, reusable data assets, the system defaults to waste.
Rethinking What a Credential Actually Is
The traditional screening model delivers a report. You order it, it comes back as a complete package, and it gets stored somewhere, often somewhere that isn’t easy to query when the next assignment comes around. So the process restarts.
A credential-centric model treats each individual element, a physical, a titer, a licensure check, as its own data asset with its own validity window and reuse logic. When a clinician moves from one assignment to the next, the system surfaces what’s still valid, flags what’s expiring, and only triggers new orders for what’s actually required.
This looks like a technical distinction. The financial implication is that your default behavior shifts from spending money to conserving it, while staying fully compliant. Across a large clinician pool, that shift is material.
Why Integration Architecture Is a Financial Decision
It’s common to think about integrations as an IT concern, something that affects workflow efficiency but doesn’t show up directly on a P&L. For healthcare staffing firms, that framing misses the real cost.
When your ATS, VMS, onboarding platform, and screening provider aren’t passing data cleanly between each other, the output is predictable: manual rekeying, duplicate orders, status updates that require someone to chase them down, and delays that push start dates back by days. Each of those has a dollar figure attached, and together they represent operating leverage that could exist but doesn’t.
When credential data moves at a granular level through well-designed API flows, your teams can see what’s on file without leaving their existing systems, status updates arrive automatically, and the number of manual touches drops. The downstream effect is fewer redundant checks, fewer delays, and better gross margins. The integration strategy and the financial strategy are the same decision.
On Speed and Quality
A concern that comes up often when firms push for faster turnaround times is that speed introduces compliance risk. In healthcare, where a missed regulatory requirement or a misattributed criminal record can damage a client relationship quickly, that concern deserves to be taken seriously.
Experience shows, though, that speed and quality stop being in tension when the process is designed with both in mind from the start. Automation handles high-volume data collection across thousands of jurisdictions efficiently. Human review stays focused where judgment is actually needed, specifically on orders with potentially reportable criminal findings, where accuracy and defensibility matter most.
The result is a process that runs faster across the board and holds up under scrutiny where it counts. Neither pure automation nor pure manual review gets you there on its own.
A Grounded View of AI in Screening
AI has become a word attached to almost every product in workforce solutions, which makes it genuinely hard to evaluate what’s useful versus what’s marketing. In background screening, the most practical applications are unglamorous but real.
Automating repetitive internal processing tasks. Normalizing inconsistent criminal record data from sources across thousands of jurisdictions. Surfacing summaries that recruiters and credentialing staff can act on without a back-and-forth. These applications reduce turnaround times and improve consistency in ways that show up in your operations.
Where AI should stay out of the process is anywhere that requires judgment with real consequences. A human-assisted model, where automation handles volume and people handle nuance, gets you the efficiency benefits without handing over decisions that shouldn’t be automated.
What Specialization Actually Means
Healthcare staffing has a credentialing and compliance landscape that is genuinely different from other industries. The specific documentation expectations of hospital systems, the multi-party accountability structures across agency, facility, and clinician, and the way client-directed screening requirements affect costs and workflows are all details that take real operating experience to understand.
A screening provider whose primary market is something else will tend to treat healthcare as an adaptation of a general-purpose product. That gap shows up in integrations that don’t quite fit, in service teams that aren’t anticipating your compliance questions, and in workflows that weren’t designed around the specific way credentials move in your business.
Specialization means the platform and service model were built for your context from the beginning, not retrofitted to it.
Questions Worth Being Honest About
If you want to evaluate how your current screening approach is affecting your margins, a few direct questions tend to surface the most useful information.
Does your team have a working credential reuse policy, or do they default to reordering because the data isn’t accessible?
Are your integrations reducing manual work in practice, or just shifting it?
Does your screening partner understand the compliance requirements your specific health system clients impose?
Are you trading speed for quality, or have you found a process that reliably delivers both?
These questions don’t always have comfortable answers. They do tend to point directly at where margin is leaking.
How UBS Approaches This
UBS was built around healthcare and healthcare staffing. It isn’t one segment among several for us; it’s the majority of what we do and has been for years. That means the integrations we build are designed for how staffing firms actually operate, the credential logic reflects reuse and validity rules your clients care about, and the team understands both the regulatory and economic pressures you’re working within.
We use a human-assisted AI approach through our sister company to improve throughput and consistency, with human judgment in the loop where it matters. Our API architecture is built to move credential data at the level of granularity that makes reuse operationally feasible rather than theoretically possible.
Background screening handled well isn’t a cost center, but rather part of the operation that either quietly drains margin or actively helps protect it. For firms competing in a tighter market, that distinction is worth paying attention to.
