By Opus Connect
After more than a decade inside the healthcare labor market, Dean Lothrop has developed a perspective that many founders and investors still underestimate: the industry is suffering from a retention collapse, not a hiring shortage.
As regional vice president at Medix, a national staffing-firm focused on healthcare, he has watched the staffing landscape shift in ways that now pose a direct threat to healthcare M&A performance.
“This is my 11th year in this business,” Lothrop said at a recent Opus Connect conference in New York City, “and the first five years I said, it’s always been hard to find people. Now more than ever, it’s harder to retain people.”
For anyone underwriting operational value, he emphasized, that distinction matters.
the risk that deal models ignore
Lothrop has seen organizations of every size default to consultants when pressure mounts, during electronic health record (EHR) conversions, revenue-cycle crises, or backlog clean-ups. It’s true, he says, that consultants deliver results, but they also take something with them when they leave.
“When you’re utilizing a consulting firm,” he says, echoing what he regularly hears from customers, “once they’re gone, their expertise is gone too.”
This dynamic quietly undermines deals. Investors count synergies and efficiencies, yet the institutional knowledge required to achieve them can walk out of the building the moment a consulting contract ends. Lothrop’s view is blunt: no platform can scale on borrowed expertise.
the countermeasure
Fortunately, there is a remedy. And as Lothrop explains, it is deceptively simple: develop local talent, then retain it.
In markets where staffing is thin, in rural areas for example, Lothrop’s teams identify local candidates and invest in their technical training, including Epic and Cerner certifications.
“What we're doing is we're taking local talent in a lot of rural geographic areas, and we're getting them certifications,” he says. “It's something that they can put on investment, and then we're deploying them on site.”
Because these individuals are rooted in the community and offered meaningful development, they tend to stay, he argues. They become stewards of the operational knowledge organizations usually lose after implementations.
What looks like a staffing tactic is, in Lothrop’s view, a form of long-term risk mitigation.
When it comes to temporary staffing surges, Lothrop doesn’t see them as a cost center but as a talent pipeline. In the conference, he pointed to a health system that needed ten people for a short-term scheduling project, fully aware that only three would be needed long term. Their strategy, he notes, was to “use that three months to evaluate those talents” and convert the top performers to full-time roles.
This is the approach he urges M&A operators to adopt: treat temporary needs as auditions for durable in-house capability, rather than as disposable labor.
the big warning
Lothrop is also skeptical of the belief that AI will resolve healthcare’s operational pressures. He begins conversations with a sequence many executives overlook: “What’s your outsourcing strategy? What’s your AI strategy?”
Those questions, he says, are typically followed by the most important one: “What’s your talent acquisition strategy, especially in the revenue cycle?”
His warning is consistent: AI requires human supervision and workflow refinement long before it delivers efficiency. Medix is often brought in, he says, to “supplement your AI strategy as you're perfecting it.” The human layer cannot be skipped.
Lothrop’s ultimate message, sharpened by years of watching organizations repeat the same costly mistakes, is simple: expertise that isn’t retained is expertise you never truly owned.
A healthcare platform can buy technology, acquire clinics, and hire consultants—but unless it builds and keeps its own operational talent, its foundations remain shaky.
Retention is no longer an HR concern. It is the boundary between a scalable, investable platform and one that will always need rescuing.
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