Last week, our CEO Morgan Haynes was a panelist on a Staffing Industry Analysts webinar: “Staffing’s Next Competitive Advantage: The Middle Office as a Strategic Platform.” Or, to put it more simply: how technology is changing healthcare staffing.
If you tuned into the webinar, you heard a lot about new tools and how they’re used in scheduling, and you heard even more about the practices that can make or break an implementation. Scheduling and maintaining fill rates aren’t the most glamorous part of healthcare, but they are the bedrock of smooth clinical operations.
Anyone involved in healthcare technology (or digital transformation at large) has heard the mantra “People, Process, Technology.” Those three words cover a lot of ground – and they were at the heart of the webinar.
Even when a technology claims to be Plug & Play, the people who use it and the processes they engage in are a little more complex. What skills does the team have? How do leadership handle change management and how does that impact the workplace culture? Are the existing workflows working and should they change to align with the technology?
This isn’t theoretical for us at Tribal Health. We live it. As born innovators and early adopters, we always look for technologies that can help us elevate our delivery. We have two goals in every engagement: helping our client facilities provide excellent patient care and ensuring our providers have a positive experience. We staff some of the hardest environments out there. For us, tech can act as a shock absorber – we don’t want our providers and partners to feel the turbulence, so to speak, when it comes to operations.
So if you didn’t catch the SIA webinar, here are a few lessons we’ve learned.
1. Your people are at the heart of every operational change.
The biggest cost of a broken process is human. When processes don’t work, people are asked to change, to build workarounds, or sacrifice time. They grow frustrated. Eventually they stop raising their hand to ask for help because they assume nothing will change.
But that friction is the perfect starting point for every technology implementation. From there, working backward, you can trace the pain point back to the process around it.
What are those pain points? Well, they differ from team to team, but SIA conducted a survey. They found out “timesheet collection and reconciliation” ate up the most labor hours. So many staffing teams are still living in paper timesheets and screenshots – and 59% still are in spreadsheets where they manually input data.
2. Often a process problem looks like a people problem.
Consider Lindsey, a payroll specialist who does the day-to-day work of processing timecards and reconciling data. When things go wrong, leadership thinks Lindsey needs more training – after all, she’s closest to the problem. But when they begin implementing a new scheduling platform, they discover Lindsey isn’t the problem at all. It’s actually a process issue.
This is such a common dynamic. Leadership hears from an aggrieved provider or facility over an error, and they assume it’s an employee’s fault – only to discover it’s actually a broken workflow. No matter how diligently that employee tries to correct everything, it almost always takes a cross-departmental effort to get things right.
3. Any technology needs to be aligned with your people and processes.
Even the right tools can’t fix an ecosystem of broken workflows. Any new tech has to be aligned with your people and the way they work. Let’s be blunt: this can be the most difficult part of an implementation. And it’s not something you can turn over to AI, because AI can’t replace your judgement or understand the context behind decisions.
Change always brings some frustration. Our advice: make sure your team understands why this initiative matters. When people can see the long-term benefits, they’re more likely to accept the inevitable pain of mapping new workflows, learning new tools, and letting go of comfortable routines. Hopefully you’ve built a culture where feedback flows both ways, so there is an existing foundation of trust. Only when your team feels safe in sharing what’s working and what’s not can you unearth the truth of what’s really driving both loss and gain.
And if this alignment doesn’t happen? Teams inevitably run into a misstep and don’t know how to fix it. “This isn’t right for us,” they’ll say or “This isn’t working for us.” They abandon the tech and revert to their old, manual ways.
But it actually can work, which is why we’re sharing what works for us.
Our journey into scheduling technology
A while back, intent on improving our scheduling functionality, we implemented Mach 1. An overnight success? Not at all. The technology was great – but we went through all the challenges we listed above.
We would change a workflow, only to discover that change created tension in another area. We uncovered gaps between departments and found out how people were compensating for them. We’d do our best to optimize every department, but continually discover new broken processes. We would follow one workflow to discover the real complexity lived somewhere else.
Luckily for us, Mach 1’s responsiveness was incredible. We could share feedback with them and they would make changes for us in real time. It was a collaboration in every sense of the word – and together we created a smoother, faster, and more efficient scheduling universe. Our team expedited their workflows, got better results, and both our clients and our clinicians noticed the difference.
Adopting technology helps you get to know your people better than you thought possible. That happened with our internal teams but it also happened with Mach 1. Our feedback helped them help us, but also provided valuable input for their product development. Together we ensured our technology and workflows went hand-in-hand.
Maybe none of this sounds too groundbreaking to anyone who’s gone through a healthcare technology implementation. But these are old and persistent challenges in our industry and we continually see healthcare teams who don’t have the tools to solve them. In 2026, we all have the power to address these issues and improve our healthcare facilities, from scheduling hard-working teams to making the back office more efficient. Don’t let fear of implementation stop you. Change management is a skill you often learn the hard way, but once you do learn it, the rewards never stop.
If you’re in healthcare or staffing industries – how are you managing new technology? What has worked for you? We’d love to know.