Ask a physician why they left a permanent position for locum work and you will usually hear some version of the same answer: control. Control over their schedule. Control over where they practice. Control over how much clinical load they carry in a given month.
That answer is well-founded. The locum tenens model, structurally, offers physicians something that employed practice rarely does: a direct relationship between the choices they make and the professional life that results. No administrator dictating patient volume. No non-compete tying them to a geography. No PTO request process for the month they want to spend in another time zone.
What the answer leaves out is what comes next — the discovery that realizing this control, in practice, requires navigating a system that was not designed with the clinician in mind.
The Administrative Reality No One Mentions
Locum tenens, as most physicians encounter it, runs through staffing agencies. The agency recruits the physician, negotiates with the facility, manages credentialing and licensing paperwork, and takes a margin — typically 25–40% of the facility's total cost — for doing so.
This model has been the industry standard for decades. And for the physician stepping into it for the first time, the experience is often surprising in ways they did not anticipate.
Credentialing is the clearest example. Every facility a physician works at requires a credentialing packet: medical school diploma, training certificates, state licenses, DEA registration, malpractice history, references, hospital privileges documentation. The list is consistent; the process for submitting it is not. A physician working at three facilities in a calendar year may assemble and submit functionally identical documentation packages three times, to three different people, in three different formats, with three different response timelines.
When something expires — a state license, a DEA certificate, a malpractice policy — the physician is responsible for tracking it, renewing it, and ensuring the new documentation reaches every facility that requires it. Most agencies provide minimal support for this. The physician discovers the gap when a credentialing coordinator at a facility flags a lapsed item, sometimes days before a scheduled shift.
Then there is the question of rates. In a traditional agency relationship, the physician is told what they will be paid. They may not know what the facility is paying the agency. They may not know whether the rate they are offered for a particular shift is above or below market for that specialty and geography. The information asymmetry is structural: the agency controls both sides of the transaction and has limited incentive to share what it knows.
What Physicians Actually Want From a Platform
This is not a fringe problem. Survey data on locum physician experience consistently surfaces the same frustrations: administrative burden, opaque compensation, poor communication from agencies, and credentialing processes that feel designed for the agency's convenience rather than the physician's.
When Rediworks was being designed, we spent significant time with working locum physicians — primary care, emergency medicine, and urgent care clinicians in various stages of their locum careers — mapping what the experience actually looked like versus what they wished it looked like.
A few themes appeared repeatedly.
They wanted to see their credentialing status in one place. Not in an email thread with a coordinator. Not by logging into a patchwork of facility-specific portals. A single view of what was current, what was expiring, and what was missing — accessible at any time.
They wanted rate transparency. Not an approximation or a range. The actual hourly rate, the facility billing rate where visible, and enough market context to know whether what they were being offered was competitive. Several physicians described turning down assignments that might have been worth taking, simply because they had no reliable benchmark.
They wanted direct access to facilities. The agency model creates a communication layer between the physician and the organization they are actually working with. Physicians described finding out details about a facility — its patient volume, its acuity profile, its operational culture — only after arriving for a first shift. They wanted to have that conversation with the facility directly before committing.
They wanted scheduling that worked like consumer software. Browsing available shifts, filtering by location and specialty, indicating availability, committing to an assignment — these are solved problems in other industries. In locum staffing, they often still happen over phone calls and email.
How Rediworks Approaches Credentialing
Credentialing is the operational centerpiece of locum work, and it has historically been one of its biggest pain points. Rediworks treats it as a first-class product problem rather than a back-office function.
When a physician onboards to Rediworks, they complete their credentialing profile once. Medical school and training documentation. State licenses. DEA registration. Board certifications. Malpractice history. References. Each item is stored, versioned, and tracked for expiration.
When a new assignment requires credentialing at a facility, Rediworks routes the physician's package to that facility directly. The physician does not reassemble documentation. The facility does not request it through a coordinator's email. The information moves in the background, and both parties can see the status.
Expiration tracking is automatic. Thirty days before a license or certification expires, the physician receives a notification. The renewed documentation, once uploaded, propagates to every facility where it is on file. The physician updates once; the update applies everywhere.
This is not technically complicated. What makes it different from the status quo is the decision to build it as a physician-facing tool rather than an agency-facing one — to design the system around the person whose credentials are being tracked, not the intermediary managing the relationship.
Transparency as a Design Principle
The rate opacity of traditional agency staffing is not incidental. It is a function of how the agency model is structured: the agency earns a percentage of the spread between what a facility pays and what the physician receives, so minimizing information flow in either direction protects the margin.
Rediworks operates differently. Physicians on the platform see the posted rate for every shift before they apply. They can filter available shifts by hourly rate, and they can see historical rate data for comparable shifts in the same geography and specialty. When they receive an offer, they know what they are being offered and have the context to evaluate it.
Facilities see physician rates directly. There is no markup layered on top that shows up in the billing relationship as a separate line. What a facility agrees to pay is what a physician receives, minus the Rediworks platform fee, which is disclosed and flat.
This approach compresses margins compared to traditional agency models. It is also the only model that makes sense if the goal is to build long-term relationships with physicians who have other options. Physicians who feel they have been paid fairly come back. Physicians who later discover they have been underpaid do not.
Scheduling Built Around Physician Availability
One of the practical advantages of locum work — the ability to control your schedule — is undermined when the mechanism for setting that schedule is manual and opaque. A physician who wants to work two weeks on and one week off in a given quarter should be able to express that preference in a system that surfaces matching opportunities. In practice, most agency relationships require the physician to reach out proactively and wait for a coordinator's response.
Rediworks provides a scheduling interface where physicians set their availability, including blackout periods, geographic preferences, and preferred shift lengths. Available shifts matching those parameters appear in real time. Applying is a single action. Confirmation is automated where facilities have set parameters in advance; where human review is required, the timeline is days rather than weeks.
Physicians can also set standing preferences — recurring shifts at a facility they have worked at before, for example — that trigger automatic notifications when matching coverage needs appear. For a physician who has built a relationship with a particular urgent care group and wants ongoing work there, this converts a manual, relationship-managed process into a lightweight automated one.
Working with Facilities Directly
The communication layer that traditional agencies interpose between physicians and facilities creates information asymmetry on both sides. The physician does not know much about the facility before committing. The facility does not know much about the physician beyond what appears in a credentialing packet.
Rediworks gives physicians direct access to facility profiles — clinical scope, patient volume, EMR systems, team composition, shift structure — before they apply. A physician can review what a shift actually looks like operationally, not just its rate and location.
On the other side, facilities receive complete physician profiles: clinical background, specialties, procedures, past locum experience, and reviews from previous assignments. The physician's work history on the platform is visible. The evaluation is symmetric.
Direct messaging between physicians and facility administrators is available on the platform before and after an assignment is confirmed. If a physician has a question about a facility's onboarding process or patient load, they can ask it directly rather than routing through a coordinator who may not know the answer.
The Autonomy Equation
Locum work offers physicians autonomy, but autonomy has prerequisites. A physician cannot exercise meaningful control over their schedule if they cannot see available shifts in real time. They cannot negotiate effectively if they do not know market rates. They cannot manage their professional infrastructure if credentialing is scattered across a dozen email threads.
These are not complaints about the locum model itself. They are complaints about the tooling that has historically surrounded it. The model is sound: independent clinical work, direct contracts, control over professional life. What has been missing is infrastructure that makes the model operationally coherent for the physician practicing it.
That is the problem Rediworks is built to solve. Not by adding layers of coordination on top of an already-complex system, but by reducing them — automating the administrative overhead, surfacing the information physicians need to make decisions, and getting out of the way of the physician-facility relationship that is the actual point.
Getting Started
Joining Rediworks as a clinician requires a state medical license (active, in good standing), board certification or eligibility in a relevant specialty, and availability for urgent care shifts in Colorado. Onboarding takes approximately 20–30 minutes: credentialing documentation is uploaded once, profile information is entered once, and the platform takes it from there.
Physicians who complete onboarding can browse available shifts immediately. There is no minimum commitment, no exclusivity requirement, and no long-term contract. The relationship is what you make it — which is, in the end, the point of locum work.
Rediworks is currently building its physician network in Colorado. If you are a physician interested in urgent care locum work and want a platform that treats your time as the valuable thing it is, join the waitlist to get early access.