How Locumsmart uses Definitive Healthcare intelligence to identify HCO prospects

Episode transcript

Emily De Oliveira:
Hi everyone, and thanks for tuning into an episode of Customer Corner. This is the Definitive Healthcare series that gives you a look into how companies are using a platform to grow their business. My name’s Emily De Oliveria, and I’m a senior product marketing manager. And on today’s episode, I’m joined by Robin Vovk, business Development Manager at Locumsmart. Robin, thanks for joining today.

Robin Vovk:
Yeah, thanks for having me, Emily.

Emily De Oliveira:
So to start, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your company?

Robin Vovk:
Sure. So my name is Robin Vovk. I’ve been in healthcare staffing sales for 23 years, and I’m currently the business development manager, as you said, for Locumsmart. We’re a technology company, so we are a vendor management system that’s at no cost to healthcare systems and contract provider groups that’s basically a bidding platform so that you can receive as many locum providers and advanced placement providers as possible through a network of agencies. So we’re the intermediate piece.

Emily De Oliveira:
And I understand that locum tenens can come with their own specific processes and requirements, which can get really complicated. So how does Locum Smart help providers and locum tenens staffing agencies?

Robin Vovk:
Sure. So to help our clients, the help is really for the healthcare systems and the contract provider groups, we offer basically three things. One of them is intelligence. So we offer robust reporting that you can receive, obviously past looking, quarter over quarter, year over year to see where you’ve spent your locum dollars, if it’s what specialties, what facilities, what agencies. So you can see who your best partners are. But not only can you see past looking, but we also do future forward projections based on shift scheduling. So you can actually predict how much you’re going to be spending on locums forward looking. We offer efficiency, so we’ll take your agency communication, workflow processes and streamline all of that.
If a healthcare system does not have any processes, we’ll help you create those processes and then we’ll give you access to as many physicians and advanced practice providers that you’ve ever had before at a level where you can scale up. You’d probably never go out and individually contract with over 60 agencies, but we have that many on our platform and we’ll handle that contracting for you. So those are the three main things, intelligence, efficiency, and access.

Emily De Oliveira:
Well, it sounds like your solutions and services really help your clients simplify the locum’s procurement process.

Robin Vovk:
Oh, absolutely. It’s invaluable.

Emily De Oliveira:
So Robin, I’m curious about your experience with Definitive Healthcare. What aspects have been particularly valuable to Locumsmart?

Robin Vovk:
Honestly, coming from the sales perspective, just having the ability to filter through all of the noise and to be able to look in Definitive Healthcare and find out the information and the potential clients that match our profiles best is one huge benefit. It’s just an enormous time saver. Being able to have all the information that I need in one place, because I can look at the healthcare system, see how large the system is in general, see all the facilities that are associated with that system, their size, their locations, the financial stability and strength of that organization, if it’s someone that we want to partner with. And then you can now also see the locums and supplemental staffing usage. There’s an actual number associated, which is amazing for me. So I can see how much do they use on contract labor, is our product going to be of value to them?
And then also from a sales calling perspective, all the executives are there. You can sort the executives by their function, by HR, finance, so you can run specific campaigns from a sales perspective specific to finance, specific to HR and just maximize your time. I also love the daily alerts. I have signed up for those on the news and intelligence. And so just every day, it’s in my inbox and I can go in and look at specific articles of situations that just happened for mergers, for people changing positions. I guess it speaks to things at my customer base. It’s important to them. And so I’ll reach out and say like, “Hey, I noticed that you guys just became part of this other larger healthcare system, congratulations.” And it’s always appreciated and I think love by the client that you’re actually keeping up with them and their organization and speaking to things that are important to them.

Emily De Oliveira:
Oh yeah, absolutely. And it’s just so fantastic that you’ve been using the Healthcare Commercial Intelligence at not just the market level, but at the account level as well. And I understand that you’ve recently used Definitive Healthcare to help you expand into the physician’s group market as well. So could you share a little bit more about that as well?

Robin Vovk:
Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, historically Locumsmart has really only contracted with midsize to larger healthcare systems. But honestly, there’s been so many mergers and acquisitions, especially over the last decade in healthcare, not just from the hospital side, but also on the group side that now, contract provider groups have become quite large themselves. Some of them spend just as much or more than healthcare systems. They have thousands of providers, so they can use our services in the same way. So just like the healthcare systems with all the information I just mentioned that’s outlined, it’s the same way on the group side.
So I’ve been using Definitive to look at groups, investigate their size. I’ve actually started by reaching out and looking at our current healthcare organizations that we work with, and then you can see who their contracted groups are and then start there and start with those groups and you can tell a story about what you’ve done for the healthcare system and maybe it’s something that would be of interest to them as well. So that’s always a nice jumping off point. But it also not only helps me identify the groups, but the same situation. I’ve got the decision makers, the presidents of the groups, and I know exactly who to reach out to.

Emily De Oliveira:
In a previous conversation, you mentioned that you’re a longtime user of Definitive Healthcare. Could you tell me more about how you’ve used the platform in other roles?

Robin Vovk:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I’ve been a longtime fan of Definitive Healthcare, and previously I worked at several locum agencies. One of them was large, one of them was smaller. The one that was the smaller size really did not have a robust database at all. So I used to just log in and utilize Definitive Healthcare as the database basically. So I would go in the morning, pull up my information for the states that I was going to be calling on and the specialty areas and would just get that list and use Definitive Healthcare as my database each day. Another way that I used it was sometimes you’ve got clients with hard to fill needs and recruiters can struggle to find those providers.
So in those cases, I would go into Definitive Healthcare and pull lists of physicians for those active state licenses. And then I would do it at that time based on the number of licenses, you could always tell who was a locum provider. Now Definitive Healthcare does that work for you and literally outlines locum providers. But I would pull those lists, hand them out to the recruiters and ask them to prospect off of those list to find candidates. And it always produced results.

Emily De Oliveira:
You really have such deep locums expertise from working at these locums firms and now at Locumsmart. So from your perspective, why is it so important for organizations focus on locum tenens to leverage healthcare commercial intelligence?

Robin Vovk:
Honestly, healthcare is a beast to navigate if you want to know the truth. And the changes are happening so fast now, they’re exponential. It’s been unbelievable. So the financial fragility of some of these healthcare systems and groups, they just keep merging and acquiring each other and combining strategic partnership, combining resources. So considering the information changes on a daily basis, having that information in real time is just invaluable. Just so I can keep up with the pace. I can’t even imagine if I didn’t have Definitive Healthcare, the amount of time it would take, I’d never even be able to get 5% of the information and it would probably take most of my time to acquire that. So just having that as a resource because it’s so nicely laid out and it’s going to pay for itself in the time it would take employees to pull that information, bother clients by calling them or spending time researching on the internet. There’s no reason not to just cut to the chase.

Emily De Oliveira:
Well Robin, thank you so much for sharing your experience there. And before we wrap up, I have one last question for you. What has the impact been for Locumsmart by using Definitive Healthcare?

Robin Vovk:
Oh, it’s been enormous. I mean, the previous sales rep here at Locumsmart, I know did not use Definitive Healthcare. I was with the organization that started in the sales role eight months ago, immediately got onto Definitive since it’s the tool I know, and started pulling lists, doing research, really targeting and drilling down the customers that I feel like our product would resonate with. And as a result, last year, compared to the eight months this year, sales have already increased more than 10 times.

Emily De Oliveira:
Wow. Well that is incredible. And really, thank you so much for sharing all of these valuable perspectives today. It has been such a pleasure chatting with you and learning more about Locumsmart. So thank you so much for being here today.

Robin Vovk:
Oh, thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity, Emily. I love you guys.

Emily De Oliveira:
And I also want to thank the audience for watching this episode of Customer Corner. If you’d like to share your story on the show, you can reach out to us at marketing@definitivehc.com and you can visit our website to learn more about how other companies are using our platform to create commercial success.