Applicant Tracking System vs Vendor Management System in Healthcare: Key Differences & Benefits

Akshaya Kuhikar Vitawerks
Sep 15, 2025
9 min read

Applicant Tracking System vs Vendor Management System in the Healthcare Industry

Staffing in healthcare is more than filling open positions; it’s about safeguarding patient care, maintaining compliance, and ensuring that hospitals and clinics have the right professionals at the right time. In today’s competitive labor market, manual spreadsheets and outdated systems leave healthcare organizations vulnerable to compliance risks, rising costs, and workforce gaps.

To manage these challenges, hospitals, clinics, and healthcare staffing agencies are adopting automated management software purpose-built for healthcare. Two of the most critical tools are the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and the Vendor Management System (VMS). While both streamline workforce processes, they serve very different purposes. Understanding the difference between the two and how they can work together is essential for modern healthcare organizations.

What Is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) for Healthcare?

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a digital platform designed to streamline the recruitment of permanent and directly engaged healthcare employees. Whether you’re hiring registered nurses, allied health professionals, administrative personnel, or clinical specialists, an ATS gives healthcare HR teams complete control over the hiring pipeline.

Unlike spreadsheets or siloed tools, a healthcare-focused ATS centralizes all applicant information into one secure, HIPAA-compliant database. Hiring managers, recruiters, and department heads can access this data to post jobs, screen candidates, and track progress from application to onboarding.

Key Functions of an ATS in Healthcare

A healthcare-specific Applicant Tracking System goes beyond basic résumé storage. It provides:

Job Board Integration for Healthcare Roles: Post positions to leading healthcare job boards, niche nursing networks, and clinical career sites with one click.
Credential & Compliance Tracking: Verify licenses, certifications, immunizations, and background checks before candidates advance to patient care roles.
Automated Candidate Communication: Send updates, reminders, and onboarding instructions automatically to reduce manual work.
Interview Scheduling & Assessment Tools: Coordinate interviews with hiring panels, assign pre-employment assessments, and manage clinical skill tests.
HIPAA-Compliant Data Security: Keep candidate data and healthcare-related information protected under strict privacy standards.
Centralized Collaboration: Allow recruiters, HR staff, and department leaders to view and evaluate candidates in real time, reducing bottlenecks.

Benefits of an ATS for Healthcare Organizations

Faster Time-to-Hire: Reduce delays in hiring nurses, physicians, and support staff, ensuring patient care continuity.
Improved Candidate Quality: Target the right professionals with job-matching algorithms and compliance filters.
Enhanced Compliance: Maintain audit-ready records of every stage of the recruitment process to meet federal, state, and hospital standards.
Better Candidate Experience: Automated, timely communication helps protect your employer brand in the competitive healthcare labor market.
Seamless Onboarding: Ensure new hires receive all required documentation, training schedules, and clinical credential verifications before their first shift.

Vars Health: Bringing ATS Power to Healthcare

Unlike generic recruiting software, Vars Health Applicant Tracking System is designed with healthcare organizations in mind. From HIPAA-compliant data management to integrated credential verification, Vars Health ATS ensures that hospitals, clinics, and healthcare staffing agencies can hire the right professionals faster, safer, and smarter.

What Is a Vendor Management System (VMS) for Healthcare?

In healthcare, managing a flexible and highly skilled contingent workforce is just as important as recruiting permanent staff. Hospitals, clinics, and healthcare staffing agencies often rely on agency nurses, locum tenens physicians, allied health professionals, and contractors to meet patient demand. Without a dedicated platform, keeping track of multiple staffing vendors, credentials, rates, and schedules becomes overwhelming.

A Vendor Management System (VMS) solves this challenge. Unlike an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which focuses on recruiting permanent employees, a VMS is purpose-built to manage an organization’s entire contingent workforce program, including the vendors supplying those professionals.

Key Functions of a Healthcare-Focused VMS

A healthcare-specific Vendor Management System like Vars Health VMS offers end-to-end management of non-employee workers and the staffing vendors who provide them. It automates every stage of the contingent workforce lifecycle, from requisition to payment, while maintaining strict compliance with healthcare regulations.

Here’s what a VMS can do for healthcare organizations:

Vendor Consolidation: Bring all your healthcare staffing agencies and vendors into one central platform. This improves visibility, consistency, and negotiating power.
Automated Credential Verification: Track and verify licenses, certifications, immunizations, and background checks before assigning contingent workers to patient care settings.
Streamlined Onboarding: Ensure agency staff, locum tenens, and allied professionals receive required documentation, training, and compliance checks automatically.
Time & Attendance Tracking: Monitor hours worked, shift locations, and compliance with staffing ratios in real time.
Automated Invoicing & Payment: Consolidate invoices from multiple vendors into one system, reducing billing errors and saving your finance team hours of manual work.
Performance Analytics: Measure vendor performance, time-to-fill, cost per hire, and quality of workers to make data-driven decisions.
HIPAA-Compliant Data Storage: Store contracts, rate cards, and worker credentials in a secure, audit-ready hub.

Benefits of a Healthcare-Specific VMS

Implementing a VMS built for healthcare unlocks powerful advantages:

Real-Time Visibility Across Facilities: Monitor staffing levels across departments and locations to prevent shortages or overstaffing.
Compliance & Risk Mitigation: Automatically enforce credential and licensing requirements to protect patient safety and reduce legal exposure.
Cost Control: Gain transparency into vendor billing, overtime, and markups to negotiate better rates and minimize waste.
Improved Quality of Care: By ensuring only qualified, credentialed staff are placed, you enhance patient outcomes and reduce clinical risk.
Scalability: Whether you’re managing hundreds of agency nurses or dozens of locum tenens providers, a VMS scales effortlessly with your needs.

Vars Health VMS: Built for Healthcare Workforce Management

Vars Health VMS is an award-winning Vendor Management System designed specifically for healthcare organizations. By leveraging enterprise-grade technology and healthcare-specific features, Vars Health VMS gives hospitals, clinics, and healthcare staffing agencies the tools they need to manage their contingent workforce programs seamlessly.

With Vars Health VMS, healthcare organizations can:

Automate every stage of the contingent workforce lifecycle.
Gain HIPAA-compliant visibility into all vendor and worker data.
Centralize agency contracts, rates, and credentials for better decision-making.
Access powerful analytics to optimize costs, staffing levels, and vendor performance.

ATS or VMS? Which Solution Works Best for Healthcare Organizations?

In the healthcare industry, staffing decisions have a direct impact on patient care, compliance, and operational efficiency. Choosing the right software to manage your workforce, whether it’s a permanent team or a contingent workforce, is critical. Two of the most important platforms in this space are the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) vs the Vendor Management System (VMS).

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is primarily designed to recruit and manage permanent healthcare employees. It automates sourcing, screening, interviewing, and onboarding, ensuring hospitals, clinics, and healthcare staffing agencies bring the right candidates in the door quickly and compliantly.

A Vendor Management System (VMS), on the other hand, is built to manage your entire contingent workforce program, including agency nurses, locum tenens physicians, allied health professionals, and contractors. It handles everything from requisition and credential tracking to timekeeping, invoicing, and vendor performance management.

Why Healthcare Organizations Often Need Both

Most hospitals, clinics, and healthcare staffing agencies rely on a mix of permanent and non-employee workers. That means they need both systems working together to cover all aspects of workforce management:

ATS for Permanent Hiring: Source, screen, and onboard full-time staff like nurses, administrative professionals, and clinical specialists.
VMS for Contingent Workforce Management: Consolidate staffing vendors, verify credentials, automate invoicing, and gain visibility into agency staff performance.

By using both systems, healthcare organizations can manage every type of worker, from permanent staff to agency-supplied professionals, under a unified approach.

Why a VMS Is the Clear Winner for Contingent Workforce Programs

If your priority is managing your contingent workforce program, a Vendor Management System (VMS) like Vars Health VMS is essential. Here’s why:

Improved Non-Employee Workforce Visibility: Track every agency nurse, locum physician, or allied health worker in real time.
Vendor Performance Monitoring: Evaluate staffing agencies on time-to-fill, compliance, and worker quality.
Automated Compliance & Credential Tracking: Enforce licensing, certification, and HIPAA requirements automatically.
Cost Savings: Consolidate vendors to negotiate better rates and eliminate overbilling or duplicate invoices.
Centralized Workforce Management: Manage all contingent workers and vendors from a single, secure platform.

These benefits lead to significant cost savings, higher-quality patient care, and improved efficiency within your healthcare contingent workforce program.

Vars Health: A Unified Solution for Healthcare Staffing

At Vars Health, we understand the unique pressures healthcare organizations face, from credentialing and compliance to 24/7 staffing demands. That’s why Vars Health ATS and VMS are built specifically for the healthcare industry. Whether you’re hiring permanent employees or managing a complex network of vendors and agency workers, Vars Health offers a single source of truth for all your staffing needs.

Discover the Power of Vars Health VMS

Managing a contingent workforce can be complex and time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. Vars Health Vendor Management System (VMS) is purpose-built to help organizations streamline their contingent workforce programs, optimize spend, and improve vendor performance. By leveraging Vars Health VMS, companies gain the ability to automate workflows, centralize data, and achieve unmatched transparency across all stages of the non-employee workforce lifecycle.

Here’s why Vars Health is the ideal Vendor Management System for your organization:

Fast Deployment: Get up and running in weeks, not months. Vars Health VMS is designed to be implemented quickly, minimizing disruption to your operations and accelerating ROI.
Transparent Pricing: Benefit from flexible pricing plans with no hidden fees. Our clear cost structure ensures you always know what you’re paying for while maximizing your vendor management ROI.
White-Label Ready: Customize Vars Health VMS with your own branding. Create a seamless experience for your internal teams and external vendors without sacrificing functionality.
Real-Time Insights: Access powerful dashboards and built-in analytics to make faster, smarter decisions about your contingent workforce program.
Audit-Ready Compliance: Store contracts, worker credentials, rate cards, and all critical workforce data in one secure hub. Simplify audits, improve compliance, and reduce risk.

About Vars Health VMS

Vars Health VMS is an award-winning, cloud-based Vendor Management System designed for organizations seeking the power of enterprise-level software without the unnecessary complexity or cost. Unlike traditional systems, Vars Health VMS combines cutting-edge technology with a user-friendly interface and tailored support to deliver superior contingent workforce management.

By leveraging Vars Health, organizations gain:

End-to-End Automation: Automate requisition, onboarding, timesheets, invoicing, and offboarding for all non-employee workers.
Centralized Vendor Management: Consolidate all your staffing agencies and suppliers in one place to gain better control, consistency, and visibility.
Enhanced Cost Savings: Monitor spend at every level, identify cost-reduction opportunities, and improve ROI across your contingent workforce program.
Compliance & Risk Management: Reduce legal exposure with automated alerts, credential tracking, and robust data security measures.
Scalable Flexibility: Whether you manage hundreds or thousands of contingent workers, Vars Health VMS scales effortlessly to match your needs.

Why Organizations Choose Vars Health VMS

The contingent labor market is evolving rapidly, and businesses need a Vendor Management System that evolves with them. Vars Health VMS is trusted by organizations because it blends enterprise-grade reliability with exceptional usability:

Enterprise-Level Security: Your data is protected with robust security protocols and compliance features.
User-Friendly Experience: No steep learning curves. Our intuitive design ensures quick adoption by hiring managers, procurement teams, and vendors alike.
Tailored Personal Service: Vars Health isn’t just a platform; it’s a partner. We provide dedicated support to help you achieve measurable outcomes.
Future-Proof Technology: Built with flexibility and scalability at its core, Vars Health VMS adapts to changing workforce models, regulations, and business needs.

Switch to Vars Health VMS or Get Started with Ease

Whether you’re exploring Vendor Management Systems for the first time or you’re ready to upgrade from a legacy platform, Vars Health makes the transition seamless. Our team specializes in migrating businesses from outdated or underperforming systems to a modern, streamlined, and fully automated VMS.

Free No-Obligation Consultation: Talk to our experts about your organization’s unique challenges, and we’ll demonstrate how Vars Health can solve them.
Self-Guided Online Demo: Take a quick 2-minute demo to see how easy it is to use Vars Health VMS for vendor consolidation, contingent workforce tracking, and compliance management.
Book a Personal Demo Today: Schedule a personalized walkthrough to experience the full power of Vars Health’s Vendor Management System and discover how it can transform your contingent workforce program.

The Vars Health VMS Advantage

The modern workforce relies increasingly on non-employee workers, from temporary staff and contractors to gig professionals. Without the right technology, managing these workers can lead to inefficiencies, compliance risks, and unnecessary costs. Vars Health VMS eliminates these challenges by providing a unified, intuitive, and scalable platform for every stage of the contingent workforce lifecycle.

With Vars Health VMS, you’ll be able to:

Gain real-time visibility into vendor performance, worker productivity, and total contingent labor spend.
Improve compliance with audit-ready documentation stored in one secure hub.
Enhance operational efficiency by automating manual processes such as onboarding, timesheets, and invoicing.
Make data-driven decisions using built-in analytics, reporting, and actionable insights.
Achieve significant cost savings through vendor consolidation and increased transparency.

Vars Health Vendor Management System (VMS) empowers your organization to streamline its contingent workforce management, reduce costs, and improve compliance, all while delivering a superior experience to your vendors and workforce alike. Whether you’re looking to consolidate your existing vendors, optimize your contingent labor spend, or simply gain better control over your non-employee workforce, Vars Health VMS provides the technology and expertise you need to succeed.

If your healthcare organization is ready to take control of its workforce strategy, Vars Health can help. Whether you’re evaluating an ATS, a VMS, or both, our team specializes in healthcare staffing technology. We’ll help you:

Transition away from manual spreadsheets and outdated systems.
Gain real-time visibility into both permanent and contingent staff.
Ensure compliance with healthcare regulations.
Optimize vendor partnerships for cost savings and better patient outcomes.

Contact Vars Health today to book a demo or request a free consultation and discover how our healthcare-focused ATS and VMS solutions can transform your staffing operations.