Outpatient Care is Booming Across the U.S.

Outpatient Care Is One of the Fastest-Growing Segments in U.S. Healthcare

The U.S. ambulatory surgery center market is projected to grow from approximately $44 billion in 2025 to more than $80 billion by 2035, at a compound annual growth rate of roughly 6 percent. Freestanding centers currently account for nearly two-thirds of the ASC market by revenue, and the shift of surgical procedures from inpatient hospitals to lower-cost outpatient settings is accelerating. Cardiac, orthopedic, and ophthalmic procedures are increasingly performed in ambulatory settings that did not exist a decade ago.

This expansion is compounding a clinical workforce challenge that was already severe. HRSA projects a shortage of nearly 140,000 full-time equivalent physicians by 2036 across all specialties, and the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis estimated the country needed more than 78,000 additional registered nurses by the end of 2025 to cover current shortfalls. Behavioral health demand is stretching provider supply further still, with estimates projecting 900,000 additional mental health workers needed by 2026.

Outpatient organizations are opening new facilities, expanding service lines, and adding locations into markets where the workforce supply is already insufficient for the demand. Growth strategy and staffing strategy are, in most of these organizations, not moving at the same speed.

The Roles Are Different. The Recruiting Playbook Needs to Be Too.

The clinical roles driving outpatient growth are not the same as the roles that have anchored hospital-based recruiting for the past two decades. Virtual nurses, care navigators, and behavioral health integration staff represent categories where qualified candidates are both scarce and highly mobile, and where the standard sourcing strategy of posting to job boards and waiting produces thin, slow pipelines.

Virtual nursing roles require a combination of clinical competency, comfort with remote technology platforms, and multi-state licensure that significantly narrows the qualified pool. Care navigators sit at the intersection of clinical knowledge and patient engagement skills that many outpatient organizations have not yet defined clearly enough to recruit against effectively. Behavioral health integration staff are among the most competitive hires in healthcare right now, given the scope of unmet demand and the licensing complexity that varies by state.

Each of these roles requires a distinct sourcing strategy: where to find qualified candidates, how to reach them before competitors do, what message resonates for each role type, and how to move from first contact to offer in a timeline that reflects market realities rather than internal approval cycles.

Speed Beats Salary. Almost Every Time.

Within a reasonable compensation band, the organization that responds faster, communicates more clearly, and creates a better candidate experience is the one that closes the hire. Research consistently supports this in clinical outpatient markets, where candidates are fielding multiple opportunities and the first credible offer often wins.

A slow ATS workflow, a hiring manager who takes ten days to review resumes, or an offer process that requires three internal approvals can cost you candidates who would have accepted the role if you had moved at the speed the market requires. These are not candidate quality problems. They are process problems.

The organizations outperforming their peers in outpatient clinical hiring are not necessarily paying more. They are moving faster, communicating more consistently, and operating with greater process discipline at every stage of the recruiting cycle. For most outpatient HR leaders, closing this gap requires an honest look at where exactly candidates are being lost, and what is causing the delay.

Where Most Outpatient TA Functions Have Healthcare Talent Acquisition Gaps

The five pillars of a high-performing talent acquisition function (people, process, technology, employer brand, and data) are rarely all strong at once in outpatient organizations. Growth-mode organizations tend to stretch their existing recruiting team across more requisitions without adding structure. Hospital systems spinning up outpatient divisions frequently carry over recruiting processes designed for a different hiring environment.

The most common gaps that show up across outpatient organizations:

Understanding which pillars are weakest is the starting point for any meaningful improvement. Hueman's Outpatient Recruiting Playbook provides a diagnostic framework for doing exactly that: identifying where your TA function is most exposed, and what to prioritize first.

When to Bring in Healthcare RPO Support

The answer for most outpatient organizations is not to hire more internal recruiters. It is to build capacity through structure, process, and the right kind of outside support that can scale with growth without requiring permanent overhead.

Organizations that partner with a healthcare RPO provider gain access to sourcing expertise for specialized clinical roles, process infrastructure that moves faster than most internal teams can sustain alone, and data visibility that allows leadership to make better workforce planning decisions. The best partnerships extend internal TA teams into the gaps that are costing the organization hires, rather than displacing the teams already in place.

Build-versus-partner is not a permanent decision. It is a framework question: given where your TA function stands today, what is the fastest path to closing the gaps that are costing you candidates in the market right now? For most outpatient organizations in active growth, the answer involves some combination of process redesign, sourcing capability, and external partnership that gets the function performing at the speed the market requires.

The CFO-facing one-pager on RPO economics in a margin-pressure environment.