Five agencies. Five credential formats. One survey away from a scramble.
If you run an independently owned Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF), you already know the pattern: every agency sends credentials in a different format, licenses expire without warning, invoices never quite match the shifts actually worked, and the day a surveyor asks for staffing files you are digging through email threads and shared drives. Health Shift Hero gives you one gateway over every agency, credential compliance that gates shifts automatically, and staffing files that are always survey-ready.
What Health Shift Hero is
Health Shift Hero is a self-serve Vendor Management System (VMS) built for the long-tail of healthcare facilities — independently owned skilled nursing facilities, assisted living, dialysis, surgery centers, and private-duty operators. You are too small for a six-figure enterprise VMS or managed service provider (MSP) contract from AMN or symplr, but you still juggle multiple staffing agencies, credential compliance, and real audit risk.
We are not a staffing agency. We are a neutral technology platform that sits between your facility and your agencies. The platform is worker-type agnostic: agency-supplied, W2 direct hire, or 1099 — you choose the employment model. ShiftKey, Nursa, and Clipboard help you fill shifts. Health Shift Hero helps you control the entire workforce pipeline: agencies, credentials, compliance, direct hires, onboarding, invoices, and audit readiness.
Vendor control — one gateway for every agency
Stop managing five agencies through five inboxes. Every agency you work with submits workers, credentials, and invoices through a single agency portal, and everything flows into one facility portal you actually control.
One agency gateway
Every participating agency works through the same portal — the same submission, the same credential file structure, the same invoice workflow. No more reconciling five formats by hand.
Facility-specific requirement rules
Set your own requirement rules — the credentials, checks, and documents your facility demands — and every agency worker is measured against them before they ever set foot on your floor.
Full audit trail
Every submission, approval, and change is recorded. When a surveyor, a corporate auditor, or your own compliance officer asks "who approved this and when," the answer is already on file.
Credential compliance — expired credentials cannot walk onto your floor
Credential compliance is not a spreadsheet you update after the fact. On Health Shift Hero it is enforced at the moment a worker is confirmed onto a shift.
Expiry tracking and shift gating
Every credential has an expiration date on file. A worker with an expired credential cannot be confirmed onto a shift — the platform refuses it, and the agency coordinator is warned before they submit. No more finding out about a lapsed license after the shift was already worked.
OIG / sanctions screening
Every credentialed worker on your account is re-screened each month against the published Office of Inspector General (OIG) / List of Excluded Individuals/Entities (LEIE) file and Louisiana's adverse-actions list. Each record carries the exact edition it was screened against, the date, and the date it is next due. A confirmed exclusion blocks placement automatically. A possible match does not: those files carry no Social Security Number, so a name match is never proof of identity, and the platform will not pull one of your workers off the floor on a guess. It goes to a review queue instead, with the published record side by side with the worker's own file — a minute's work, and the decision is recorded with its reason and its author.
Survey-ready credential packet export
Export a clean credential packet on demand. When surveyors ask for staffing files, you hand over an organized, current document set instead of scrambling through email and shared drives.
Health Shift Hero holds clinician credential and billing data, not patient records. Credential file management in VMS Core reflects the current month to the facility; contact the agency or supplier for full historical files, or add Compliance Audit for complete historical credential records.
CMS reporting — the numbers that set your Five-Star rating
Accreditation is optional for most freestanding SNFs. Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) reporting and the federal staffing minimum are not. Those numbers feed your Five-Star rating and your enforcement exposure, and agency staff are usually how you close the gap on short notice — so the system that tracks your agency labor should be the system that reports it.
Staffing minimum dashboard
Track hours per resident day (HPRD) against the federal minimum of 3.48 total nurse HPRD — from worked, approved hours rather than from what was scheduled. See where you stand day by day, and see the projection for the days ahead while you can still fix them.
One-click PBJ export
Export contract-staffing hours as CMS Payroll-Based Journal XML, built from the same approved timecards the invoices were audited against. The agency half of PBJ is the half facilities most often assemble by hand.
Survey binder export
Export a survey-ready binder — credentials, verifications, competencies, and the approval trail behind each shift — as one document set, on demand, for the whole period a surveyor asks about.
Health Shift Hero produces these reports from your platform data; you remain responsible for what you file and for meeting your own regulatory obligations.
Bring your agencies with you — they claim an account you already filled in
Adoption usually stalls on the vendors, not the software. So the agencies you already work with do not start from a blank signup form: you invite them from your own vendor list, and they land in an account that already holds the relationship — the invoices you filed against them, and a contract proposal from your side, waiting.
There is no open signup. An account exists only behind an invite from someone you already do business with, which is also why your vendor list stays yours.
Invoice control — audited against what actually happened
Agency invoices are where money quietly leaks. Health Shift Hero runs an invoice and payment workflow that audits each invoice against platform truth — the shifts that were actually worked and the rates you actually agreed to — so discrepancies surface before you approve, not after you have paid.
Audited against platform truth
Every invoice line is checked against confirmed shifts and agreed rates recorded on the platform. Hours that were never worked and rates that do not match your agreement are flagged for you to review.
Statements and approval, in one place
Review, question, and approve agency statements from the same portal that holds the credentials and the shift record. One system of record, one clear approval trail.
Invoice control is a review, audit, and approval workflow — statements and approvals. Health Shift Hero does not move money or promise same-day pay.
Grow beyond agencies — when you are ready
VMS Core controls your agency labor at $0 to your facility. As your workforce program grows, you can add facility-paid modules that extend the same control to your own employees, your direct hires, and your onboarding.
Compliance Audit — $300/mo
Manage your own employees the way you manage agency staff: employee credential records with full history, expiration tracking and reports, monthly OIG/sanctions re-screening, an audit-ready document vault, and direct-hire onboarding records.
Network — $900/mo + 2% placement fee
Turn your facility into its own local talent network: a job-posting page, QR-code application links, shift bidding and availability capture, an internal float pool, a candidate pipeline, and an agency-vs-direct comparison dashboard.
AI Intake & Onboarding — +$300/mo
Cut the admin load on applications and onboarding: resume parsing, skills extraction, credential matching, onboarding packet prep, and form-field mapping with missing-field flags. It prepares the packet and routes it for proper human completion and signature — a person still reviews, completes, and signs. On the roadmap — see what is live today.
Premier Workforce Hub — $1,500/mo
The full operating stack: VMS Core, Compliance Audit, Network, and AI Intake together, plus advanced reporting, rule templates by department, vendor scorecards, rate analytics, compliance exception dashboards, and priority support.
AI Intake & Onboarding assists with packet preparation, resume parsing, field mapping, and missing-field flags, then routes the packet for proper human completion and signature. It does not complete or file I-9s or tax forms automatically — a person reviews and signs.
Start with VMS Core — $0 to your facility
VMS Core is supplier-funded: your facility pays $0, and participating agencies pay 2% of their gross billings. You get the agency gateway, facility portal, worker profile portal, credential file management, invoice/payment workflow, agency compliance packets, monthly OIG/sanctions re-screening, credential-expiry shift gating, facility-specific requirement rules, and a full audit trail — from day one, with no procurement cycle and no facility subscription.
Fee transparency is a feature, not fine print. VMS Core is funded by a 2% fee on participating agencies' gross billings; the facility pays nothing for it. The Network module carries a 2% placement fee: for W2 direct hires it applies to gross wages and is capped at the first 460 worked hours per hire (no further fee after the cap); for per-diem / 1099 shifts it is 2% of the total shift price, per shift, with no cap.