How to Assemble a Nurse Float Pool for Fast, Cost-Effective Shift Fulfillment
Hospitals have long struggled to build and manage internal nurse float pools, often relying on manual processes and outdated tools. These practices hinder effective scheduling coordination, credential tracking, and real-time responses to staffing changes, resulting in costly, inefficient, and hard-to-scale float pool management. Sound familiar?
Your hospital can radically transform staffing efficiency and care delivery with the right workforce technology. ShiftMed Flex, for example, equips you with the tools to build, scale, and sustain an effective nurse float pool that serves as an essential bridge between core nursing staff and supplemental clinical resources.
5 Reasons to Optimize Your Hospital Float Pool
Optimizing nurse float pools is essential for hospitals aiming to improve staffing efficiency and maintain high-quality care. By strategically managing float nurses, you can fill shifts quickly, reduce costly contract labor, and enhance nurse satisfaction.
Here’s why hospitals should focus on optimizing float pools for better operational outcomes:
1. Fill Scheduling Gaps Fast
Direct access to a nurse float pool allows your hospital to quickly fill gaps across various departments, ensuring consistent care during peak times or unexpected absences.
2. Reduce Travel Nurse Costs
Float nurses reduce reliance on external staffing agencies and overtime pay, allowing your hospital to control labor costs while meeting fluctuating patient demands.
3. Enhance Care Continuity
Float nurses are more familiar with your hospital’s protocols and culture, leading to smoother workflows and better patient outcomes than contract labor.
4. Boost Staff Satisfaction
Float nurses reduce the burden on full-time nursing staff, lowering burnout by alleviating the need for excessive overtime and providing support during high-demand periods.
5. Improve Operational Efficiency
Your hospital can standardize training for float nurses, ensuring they’re prepared to work across multiple units, enhancing flexibility and readiness.
5 Tips for Effective Float Pool Management
To build, engage, or grow your nurse float pool, you need smart workforce technology that streamlines float pool management, controls rising travel nurse costs, fixes broken shift pickup processes, and eases premium pay frustrations. When evaluating workforce technology, here are five things to focus on for effective float pool management:
1. Nurse Preferences
Most nurses seek job flexibility and a better work-life balance, so it's essential to leverage mobile app technology that gives them complete control over their schedules. The app should make it simple for nurses to claim shifts, track their hours, manage their schedules, and communicate seamlessly with your team.
2. Streamlined Credentialing
Verification of qualifications, experience, and professional standing requires time and effort. While credentialing demands thoroughness, with the right workforce technology, you can quickly streamline your efforts and expedite floating nurses into shifts.
3. Automated Deployment
Look for workforce technology that automates staff deployment, instantly broadcasting shift vacancies to float nurses with the required credentials and competencies through a mobile app.
4. Compliance Monitoring
Staying current with complex healthcare regulations and frequent legal updates is a constant challenge. Therefore, selecting workforce technology that proactively tracks when nurses need to update their credentials before expiration or to meet new professional requirements is crucial.
5. Visibility and Data Analytics
Complete visibility into your nurse float pool enables efficient staffing by ensuring qualified nurses fill shifts, optimizing resource use, maintaining compliance, controlling costs, and allowing quick responses to patient care demands.
How ShiftMed Supports Nurse Float Pool Management
Whether optimizing an existing float pool or looking to expand, ShiftMed empowers your hospital to do both. Scale up float capacity with qualified, credentialed nurses already in your system and leverage our local per diem network of credentialed ShiftMed nurses when volumes spike.
Flexible Nursing Jobs App
The ShiftMed Flex app, which we tailor to your branding and staffing requirements, lets float nurses claim open shifts 24/7, giving them full control over their schedules and boosting engagement through increased flexibility and autonomy.
Float Pool Prioritization
ShiftMed Flex uses AI-driven Intelligent Routing Technology to streamline and scale your staffing operations. It prioritizes your nurse float pool for shift fulfillment and taps into external clinical support as needed—filling your scheduling gaps quickly, cost-effectively, and without compromising care quality.
Centralized Scheduling
ShiftMed Flex eliminates scheduling blind spots, inefficient shift matching, and administrative hurdles through centralized scheduling. It provides real-time shift visibility and automated matching that aligns the right float nurses with the right shifts—optimizing your staffing levels and saving you money.
Streamlined Credentialing
As you expand your nurse float pool, our add-on Credential Cloud module simplifies onboarding by allowing nurses to upload their credentials and digitally sign documents in the ShiftMed Flex app. You can customize your credential requirements by worker type and location for seamless compliance.
Flex Boosts Hospital Float Pool Engagement
UNC Health, headquartered in Chapel Hill, manages an extensive network of inpatient and outpatient facilities across all 100 counties in North Carolina. However, low participation in their float pool was creating persistent staffing gaps across 258 outpatient clinics—putting strain on full-time staff and impacting care quality.
To address this challenge, UNC Health partnered with ShiftMed in November 2024 to implement ShiftMed Flex and empower float nurses with real-time access to open shifts. By giving nurses control over when and where they work, the platform increased flexibility and engagement across the board.
Within just three months of launching ShiftMed Flex, float nurses doubled their monthly shift commitments—from an average of four to eight shifts per month—significantly improving coverage and easing the burden on core staff.
Conclusion: Build a Stronger Nurse Float Pool With ShiftMed
As hospitals navigate staffing shortages, rising labor costs, and increasing demand for flexible care delivery, nurse float pools are vital components of a sustainable healthcare workforce strategy.
With the right workforce technology, your hospital can transform float pool management from a time-consuming burden into a strategic advantage. ShiftMed Flex empowers you to build, scale, and sustain a highly efficient float pool—while improving nurse satisfaction, reducing travel nurse dependency, and ensuring every shift is filled with qualified, credentialed staff.
From automated deployment and credentialing to real-time shift visibility and centralized scheduling, ShiftMed gives you the tools to confidently meet today's staffing challenges and tomorrow’s patient care needs. Contact us for a free workforce consultation today!