In the United States, the number of workers who are employed by temporary staffing agencies as a career is continuing to grow. This is especially true in healthcare.

On Assignment, Inc., a publicly-traded provider of temporary staffing for laboratories and for healthcare, was looking for a more effective way to not only manage data about employees, but also provide clients with access to this information via the Internet. In order to provide temporary staffing in healthcare, the management of licenses, certifications, and other credentials for your employees is critical. Also, many of these credentials have finite time limits and have to be renewed on an ongoing basis. This means managing vast amounts of dynamically changing information. In addition, hospitals and other facilities are regularly audited to ensure compliance, so they need to have access to all of this information on a virtual 24 hour basis.

On Assignment wanted a way to not only manage the documents internally, but to provide clients with remote access to these systems so that they could more effectively access data they needed without the need for massive amounts of mail and fax. "On Assignment asked us to review the tools available to help them. To complicate matters, On Assignment was in the midst of a massive PeopleSoft implementation, so whatever solution we chose had to be able to pass information back and forth, and also had to be stand-alone enough so as not to disturb the implementation" noted Herrera.

For On Assignment, KnowledgeSource built a customized system that provides dynamic information management from multiple data sources and serves it up using the Internet. Clients can review the qualifications of On Assignment employees, make decisions about whether to hire them and subsequently manage this information remotely. The system interacts with PeopleSoft, is highly customizable and was done using open source software, so there are no ongoing license fees.