A Workforce Model That No Longer Works

Pick any large healthcare organization across the country, and you’ll see the same story unfolding. There’s more administrative work to do than ever before, and not enough people to do it. Medical departments are scrambling to keep up. 

This isn’t a temporary situation. The trained professionals needed to bridge the gap between work and workers aren’t on their way. In fact, they’re consistently on their way out of healthcare. That’s a big reason why the current workforce problem is a systemic issue, and not situational. Without an influx of new administrative workers, the pressure won’t cease until the workforce model changes.

Admin Pressures Keep Ramping Up

The workload driving all of this shows no signs of easing, and it’s coming from multiple angles. Inpatient volumes are up. Medicare Advantage plans alone issued nearly 50 million prior authorization requests in 2023, up more than 40% from 2020 (KFF). On the back end, payers are using AI to reject claims at rates in-house RCM teams can’t match. Only 14% of providers use AI to help reduce denials (Experian Health). Most still work them by hand. Payers don't, and the financial impact is jarring: across 2,300 U.S. hospitals in 2025, denials and bad debt drove $48 billion in net revenue losses, up 25% from the year before (Kodiak).  

The Old Standbys Can't Be Trusted

Hospitals have two tried-and-true maneuvers when admin pressure ramps up: hire more full-time employees, or bring in contract workers from staffing agencies to meet the rush. Neither strategy works anymore. The talent pool is too thin to hire from: 63% of providers now report staffing gaps in their RCM departments (Relias), and front-office roles turn over at a 40% annual rate (MGMA). Staffing agencies are built to fill short-term gaps like maternity leave and illness, not to provide long-term capacity in specialized areas like prior authorization and revenue cycle management. Staffing agency costs only exacerbate the situation. Their markups can run 25% to 100% over base admin pay. Between 2019 and 2022, contract labor expenses at U.S. hospitals grew 258% (AHA), a lot of it for workers who couldn’t fill specialized areas of need. 

Time For a New Mindset and Model

The way forward isn’t about doing more of what’s not working. It’s about replacing a broken model with a new approach. One that focuses on increasing capacity instead of adding more on-site FTEs, and on delivering sustainable workforce infrastructure instead of short-term Band-Aids. 

What Is Workforce Infrastructure?

Workforce Infrastructure is a category of administrative capacity that falls outside traditional full-time hiring or outsourcing. It's trained administrative professionals working inside a hospital's native systems, following established processes, and meeting expected productivity and quality standards. The administrative professionals aren’t on the hospital's payroll, and they're not on site. But operationally, they function as part of the hospital's administrative team.

The work the admin professionals do spans the patient journey, from financial clearance and authorization management to patient access staffing support and revenue cycle recovery. And unlike traditional staffing, workforce infrastructure flexes with the work. When patient volumes spike, capacity expands to absorb the surge. Meanwhile, hospital administrators avoid the hamster wheel of recruiting, hiring, and cutbacks to keep pace with unpredictable workloads. 

Moving forward, administrative capacity should be measured by how much work you can get done, and how easily, not by how many employees you have on payroll to do it.  What matters now is having access to workforce infrastructure that supports the ebbs and flows of the operation, and getting it without giving up the control or standards that are typically lost with traditional outsourcing.

Hospitals Don't Have Time To Wait

The paradox hospitals and health systems find themselves in is easy to explain but much harder to solve: too much admin work and not enough people to do it. 

There’s no answer in the current workforce model. So, a new model is required. One that favors built-in workforce infrastructure over hiring cycles and headcounts. That’s the change that puts hospitals, health systems, and large practices back in control of their administrative function and capacity. 

Since 2019, GMVA has been building workforce infrastructure and administrative support for healthcare organizations. Epic-approved, integrated into existing EHR and workflow environments, and trusted by more than 1,000 providers, the company has maintained a core client retention rate above 90%. GMVA already deploys the model described in this article, operating at scale for healthcare organizations across the U.S. 

Curious what workforce infrastructure can do for your organization? Get in touch at https://gmva.com/contact-us.