Locum Tenens Volume Is Growing as Physician Shortages Persist
The locum tenens industry generated approximately $5.2 billion in revenue in 2025 and is forecast to surpass $6 billion by 2028, according to the National Association of Locum Tenens Organizations (NALTO) 2026 industry report. Hospitals, rural health clinics, and federally qualified health centers are filling permanent physician vacancies with locum coverage at record rates, driven in part by ongoing shortages projected by AAMC to reach 86,000 physicians by 2036.
For staffing firms, this demand surge is a revenue opportunity — and an administrative burden. Each locum physician or advanced practice provider placed requires a credentialing dossier, a signed service agreement, travel and lodging coordination, and ongoing communication with both the provider and the receiving facility throughout the assignment lifecycle.
Administrative Tasks a Virtual Assistant Owns
Locum tenens firms that integrate virtual assistants are offloading the coordination-heavy workflows that consume recruiter and operations staff time:
Provider credentialing documentation. The VA collects DEA certificates, state medical licenses, malpractice insurance certificates, ECFMG verification (for international graduates), hospital privilege applications, and any facility-specific attestation forms — tracking status in a shared credentialing dashboard.
Assignment scheduling coordination. When a facility confirms an open assignment, the VA cross-references provider availability calendars, drafts the scheduling confirmation to both parties, and maintains the master assignment calendar used by operations leadership.
Travel logistics documentation. Locum placements often require flight bookings, rental car arrangements, and hotel or extended-stay coordination. VAs working from approved vendor lists manage the documentation trail — confirmations, receipts, and itinerary summaries — keeping providers and accounting teams aligned.
Facility client communication. Routine facility inquiries — start date confirmations, onboarding paperwork status, parking and badging instructions — are handled by the VA using pre-approved response templates, freeing relationship managers for strategic conversations.
The Staffing Operations Bottleneck
NALTO member firms report that operations coordinators handling locum placements manage an average of 15 to 25 active assignments simultaneously, with each assignment generating 40 to 60 individual communication touchpoints before the first day of service. At that volume, delays in document collection or scheduling confirmations directly translate to revenue loss — facilities that do not receive timely credentialing updates will reassign open orders to competing firms.
Virtual assistants working in dedicated healthcare staffing support roles can process credentialing document requests, update tracking systems, and send follow-up communications at a pace that in-house staff at comparable cost cannot match.
Cost Economics for Mid-Sized Firms
A locum tenens firm placing 50 providers per month spends roughly 200 to 300 hours per month on credentialing and scheduling coordination alone, based on industry time-and-motion estimates. At the cost of a single domestic operations coordinator ($45,000 to $60,000 annually plus benefits), that capacity is often insufficient to prevent backlogs during high-volume periods.
Two part-time virtual assistants — each working 20 hours per week — can cover the same administrative output at 40 to 60% of the fully loaded cost of one domestic hire, while providing scheduling flexibility to absorb demand spikes without overtime costs.
Building Scalable Infrastructure for 2026
Locum tenens firms that treated operations staffing as a fixed overhead category are discovering that variable-cost VA models align better with the cyclical nature of physician placement volume. Flu season surges, residency graduation windows, and contract non-renewals all create predictable volume spikes that a flexible VA team can absorb.
The firms gaining market share in 2026 are those that have systematized their credentialing and scheduling workflows into repeatable processes that a trained VA can execute — enabling their recruiters to spend time on what drives revenue: sourcing providers and securing exclusive facility relationships.
For locum tenens staffing firms evaluating virtual assistant programs, Stealth Agents offers healthcare staffing-trained VAs with hands-on experience in provider credentialing, scheduling coordination, and facility communication workflows.
Sources
- National Association of Locum Tenens Organizations (NALTO), 2026 Locum Tenens Industry Report, 2026
- AAMC, The Complexities of Physician Supply and Demand: Projections from 2021 to 2036, 2024 Update
- Locum tenens operations time-and-motion benchmarks, industry operator surveys, 2025