Cleveland Clinic Case Study
In healthcare, the people who keep an organization running are not only the ones on payroll. Contractors, visiting researchers, students, and volunteers move through hospital facilities every day, and every one of them has to be background-checked, vaccinated, trained, and granted the right network and building access before they can step on site.
Now do that roughly 38,000 times a year, across 23 hospitals and 276 outpatient facilities, under the kind of regulatory scrutiny that comes with regular audits. For most of its history, Cleveland Clinic managed exactly this — manually, with spreadsheets and office file folders, run by a small Security Administrative Services team.
It worked, but it left little room to scale and plenty of room for delay and error. That is where Rival Workflow comes in.
Cleveland Clinic + Rival Workflow, by the numbers
- 38,000 non-employee personnel onboarded each year with Rival Workflow
- 650,000 tasks automated per year
- 340,000 administrative hours saved
- $8.5M in cost savings
- 30x return on investment
A world-class institution with a high-volume onboarding challenge
Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit academic medical center with 23 hospitals and 276 outpatient facilities in locations around the globe. Alongside its own staff of 70,000 employees, it works with roughly 38,000 non-employees each year to deliver on its mission of caring for life, advancing health through research, and educating those who serve. These non-employee personnel range from contractors and visiting researchers to students and volunteers — some on site daily, others working remotely.
Bringing them on board is anything but simple. The process spans several interdependent steps — background checks, vaccination records, training modules, and both network and physical building access — that must be completed in sequence, partly online and partly in person. Transparency and compliance are non-negotiable, since medical facilities face regular audits by regulatory bodies.
Despite the complexity and the stakes, all of it was handled manually by a small Security Administrative Services team using spreadsheets and file folders — a setup exposed to delays, errors, and inefficiency, with little room to scale.
“We don’t allow anyone on property without being processed through, and they have to pass a background check.”
— Melissa Blevins, Department Manager, Security Administrative Services, Cleveland Clinic
The solution: Rival Workflow
Cleveland Clinic implemented Rival Workflow to streamline non-employee onboarding across three dimensions:
- Automation at scale. By digitizing and automating critical onboarding forms and processes, Cleveland Clinic eliminated manual tasks and administrative bottlenecks — ensuring non-employee personnel are ready to contribute on day one while saving significant operational time.
- Connection across departments. Rival Workflow integrates cross-departmental onboarding tasks, uniting internal teams and external contributors and clearing non-employee staff for onsite work with zero disruption.
- Compliance through standardization. By standardizing form fields, maintaining data accuracy, and simplifying reporting, Cleveland Clinic uses Rival Workflow to ensure audit readiness and information integrity.
Rival Workflow in action
Clearance before access
Cleveland Clinic follows stringent protocols for onsite personnel — background checks, vaccination requirements, and disease testing that can vary by facility location and the services provided. Rival Workflow simplifies the tracking of these clearing steps, ensuring every requirement is completed and verified before onsite access is granted. Automating this process delivers safety, compliance, and readiness without the heavy administrative burden.
Managing badging and identity
Cleveland Clinic uses Rival Workflow to simplify access and badging for non-employee staff, where expiration dates are tied to factors like a student’s graduation date or a contractor’s completion timeline. A process that previously took 15–20 steps to update now takes just 3–5. Processing 200–300 badges daily, the Security Administrative Services team saves significant time and frees up capacity for higher-impact work.
At the request of individual physicians, Cleveland Clinic also built preferred names into the onboarding workflow, so badges reflect each person’s chosen identifiers — a meaningful enhancement to the non-employee staff experience.
Scaling a learning institution
As a leading academic institution, Cleveland Clinic manages student rotations on a massive scale — up to 6,000 students in the nursing program alone each semester. Rival Workflow reduces the complexity of bringing those students in cleared, compliant, and ready to learn, with bulk-upload capabilities that eliminate hours of manual data entry and launch thousands of onboarding events simultaneously. Students appreciate the clarity and ease of completion, helping Cleveland Clinic maintain its standard of excellence.
A trusted, long-term partnership
For [X] years, Cleveland Clinic has trusted Rival as a partner in managing the complexities of a world-class healthcare institution. As the partnership has grown, so has Rival’s ability to address Cleveland Clinic’s evolving needs with precision and care.
“I feel that Rival understands the Cleveland Clinic. They understand that obviously we need this system in order for us to be an up-and-running hospital within the United States. Things happen quickly when they need to.”
— Melissa Blevins, Department Manager, Security Administrative Services, Cleveland Clinic
Calculating the ROI
In 12 months, the results spoke for themselves:
- $8M saved — a 30x return on investment
- 650K tasks automated
- 340K administrative hours saved
Ready to take the hard work out of workflow?
Rival will help you take the hard work out of workflow. See how Rival Workflow can streamline onboarding across your organization — at any scale. Talk to an expert.
