Workforce costs typically make up the largest line item in a health system’s budget, yet basic questions about that spend often require days of digging across multiple systems to answer. If your finance team can’t answer these quickly, that gap itself is worth paying attention to.

How Much Are We Actually Spending on Contingent Labor?

Not the budgeted number. The actual, current spend, broken out by location and department. Many organizations can produce an aggregate figure but struggle to break it down further without a manual pull from multiple systems.

What Does It Cost Us to Replace an Employee Who Leaves?

Turnover cost includes recruiting time, onboarding, lost productivity during ramp-up, and often temporary coverage in the gap. Most organizations underestimate this figure because it’s rarely tracked as a single number tied to a specific role or department.

How Much of Our Open-Shift Volume Could Our Own Staff Have Covered?

This is the question that matters most and the one almost no organization can answer without a system built to track it. Without visibility into which employees had availability and the right credentials for a given open shift, there’s no way to know how much contingent spend was actually avoidable.

What’s Our Current Ratio of Employed to Contingent Labor, by Department?

A system-wide average hides where the real problem is concentrated. A department running at a healthy ratio can mask another department that’s dangerously dependent on outside staffing, and averaging the two together makes it hard to prioritize where to act first.

Why This Matters Beyond the Numbers

A CFO who can answer these questions has a real handle on workforce cost drivers. One who can’t is making budget decisions on incomplete information, which usually means the actual fix, whatever it turns out to be, gets delayed by another quarter of guessing.

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