APPLETON, WI — April 7, 2026
TotalMed, a premier healthcare workforce solutions provider, today announced a new partnership to serve as the managed service provider (MSP) for a leading academic health system, unifying contingent labor management across its facilities.
Under the agreement, TotalMed will consolidate requisition management, credentialing, and vendor performance reporting into a single program, giving the health system one accountable partner and one source of truth for contingent labor spend.
“Academic health systems carry a teaching mission alongside patient care, and their staffing needs reflect that complexity,” said a TotalMed executive. “Our job is to make the workforce side predictable so their leaders can focus on care and education.”
The program begins with a phased rollout across the system’s acute care facilities, expanding to ambulatory and specialty sites over the following two quarters.
About TotalMed
TotalMed delivers healthcare workforce solutions across travel, per diem, permanent placement, and managed service programs, matching clinicians with the facilities that need them most.
Questions worth asking up front
Start by writing down what you actually need from the assignment. That sounds obvious, but there is a real difference between wanting a specific city, wanting a specific unit, and wanting the highest weekly take-home you can find. Those three goals pull in different directions, and being honest about the ranking makes every later conversation shorter. A recruiter who knows your ranking can filter dozens of postings down to the two or three worth a phone call.
Verify the schedule in writing before you commit. Ask how many shifts per week are guaranteed, whether weekends are built into the rotation or assigned separately, and what happens to your pay if the unit census drops and the facility cancels a shift. Guaranteed-hours language is where contracts differ most, and it is the single clause that has the biggest effect on what you actually bank over thirteen weeks.
Give yourself more lead time than you think you need. Between licensure, immunisation records, background checks, and facility-specific modules, the gap between accepting an offer and standing on the floor is usually two to four weeks, sometimes longer for a state that has not yet joined a compact. Clinicians who keep a current document folder — titles, dates, expirations, and scans — routinely start a full week earlier than those assembling it from scratch.
Where people get tripped up
Housing deserves its own decision, made on its own terms. A stipend gives you control and can leave money on the table in your favour if you find something modest, but it also means you are the one signing a short-term lease in a market you do not know. Company-placed housing costs more in effective terms and removes the search entirely. Neither is the correct answer in general; the correct answer depends on how much risk and admin you want to hold.
Talk to someone who has worked the unit, not just the system. Facility-level reputation is far more predictive than the health network above it. Ratios, charge-nurse support, how travellers are treated in the assignment mix, and whether the unit orients you properly are all unit-level facts. Professional forums help, but a direct conversation with a clinician who finished a contract there in the past year is worth more than a dozen posts.