Flex Staffing and Growth Planning as a Strategic Advantage

For large ambulatory organizations, staffing decisions are rarely confined to a single clinic or a single day. Leaders must balance daily variability with long-term growth — ensuring teams are deployed efficiently today while planning confidently for tomorrow.

ColumbiaDoctors uses TeamBuilder as more than a daily scheduling tool. It serves as a strategic engine that supports flexible staffing within a building and enables data-driven planning for future facility growth. The result is smarter deployment across existing clinics and scalable decision-making as new programs and locations come online.

Creating Flex Within the Building

ColumbiaDoctors implemented a building-level float and flex staffing model, allowing staff to move across suites and specialties within the same facility.

Rather than operating in isolated schedules by clinic or specialty, teams could be flexed dynamically based on need. This approach helped close coverage gaps faster, reduced idle time, and improved the ability to respond to day-to-day variability — without adding unnecessary capacity.

By creating visibility into where staff were working and where support was needed, ColumbiaDoctors gained the operational flexibility required to manage the realities of ambulatory care.

Planning for Growth With Confidence

Beyond daily operations, ColumbiaDoctors used TeamBuilder to support planning as additional departments and facilities transitioned to a shared staffing model.

Departments already had established providers and patient volume. The question was not whether demand existed — it was how much staffing would be required to support that volume.

Using provider templates and volume assumptions, ColumbiaDoctors modeled expected visit activity and translated that demand into staffing requirements by program, day, and shift.

This allowed teams to evaluate:

• what staffing would be needed to support existing provider volume
• how resources could be flexed from within the organization
• the operational impact of bringing new departments or buildings under centralized staffing

The planning model followed a clear path:

Provider volume → workload demand → staffing required

With this structure in place, leadership could confidently resource staffing for new departments and a newly opened building — ensuring appropriate coverage from day one, without overstaffing or guesswork.

A Measurable Workforce Impact

Through increased float and flex visibility combined with day-to-day execution, ColumbiaDoctors achieved:

15%+ workforce payroll reduction in year one

This improvement was driven by better alignment between staffing and actual operational demand — ensuring resources were deployed where they were needed most.

Operational Excellence and Strategic Insight

TeamBuilder enabled ColumbiaDoctors to realize impact across both operations and strategy.

On the operational side, building-level float and flex reduced downtime, improved coverage, and kept teams responsive to daily variability — all without adding excess capacity.

From a strategic perspective, forecast-driven staffing models informed expansion decisions, helping leadership right-size hiring and deployment as new clinics and programs came online.

Together, these capabilities allowed ColumbiaDoctors to manage today’s complexity while planning confidently for future growth.

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