Screening requirements for clinical healthcare assignments

Last updated: August 19, 2026

Applies to: Staffing partners placing workers into clinical healthcare roles in the US. Non-clinical roles and assignments outside the US are not affected by the rules below.

Summary: Clinical healthcare assignments carry a required set of screenings, and the platform will not approve the assignment until those screenings have been ordered. If a healthcare assignment is sitting unapproved, an unordered or unusable required screening is the most likely reason. The requirements are driven by the job category, so getting the category right when you create the job is what makes the rest work smoothly.

What is required

When a job is categorised as clinical healthcare, every assignment under it must have screenings covering:

Identity and criminal history — an SSN trace plus national and county criminal searches.
Healthcare sanctions — confirming the worker is not on federal or state healthcare exclusion lists.
Professional license verification — confirming the licence the role requires is current and in good standing.

These are on top of, not instead of, the minimum screening every assignment carries. Facilities and states frequently add their own requirements — drug screening, occupational health screening, or specific training — which are configured for the client or job.

How the requirements get onto the assignment

You do not normally have to assemble this yourself. When you create an assignment under a clinical healthcare job, the platform selects the screening packages that satisfy the requirements by default, and shows required screenings while you are creating the job. Packages configured on the client or the job are applied as usual.

What you do control:

Set the job category correctly. A clinical role filed under a general category is not allowed, and it becomes a compliance problem later rather than a convenience now.
Leave the defaults in place. If you explicitly supply your own list of screenings, the platform stops auto-adding and will instead reject the assignment as incomplete until the required coverage is present.
Make sure the worker's license details are right before the check is ordered — name and license number have to match the issuing board's records.

Why an assignment will not approve

A clinical healthcare assignment cannot be approved — manually or automatically — until the required screenings have been ordered and are still usable. If they are not, approval is refused with:

"Required screenings have not been ordered or are no longer usable for this assignment"

A screening stops counting toward the requirement if it was cancelled, if the invitation expired before the worker completed it, or if it came back not eligible. This is the case people find most surprising: a check that was ordered can stop satisfying the requirement later, and the assignment then falls back out of an approvable state. An expired invitation is the usual culprit, and it is fixed by re-ordering the check.

Note the gate is about screenings being ordered and usable, not about every result being back — so an assignment can be approved while checks are still running, and the worker still cannot start until results clear.

Workers you have placed before

Screenings follow the worker, not the assignment. When you create a new assignment for someone who already has a qualifying check with Ascen, that check is moved onto the new assignment rather than reordered, so you are not billed twice and the worker is not asked to repeat anything. A new check is only ordered where a required item has no usable check at all.

This is another reason to get the job category right at creation time: reuse is matched against what the new assignment requires.

If a healthcare assignment is stuck

Open the assignment and check the Background Checks tab — look for anything cancelled or expired rather than just anything incomplete.
Confirm the job category is the clinical healthcare category.
Check whether the worker still has an outstanding step. An unaccepted screening invitation blocks everything behind it and is the single most common cause.
If everything looks ordered and current and the assignment still will not approve, email support@ascen.com with the assignment ID.

How long does it take for an assignment to be approved?
Creating clients, jobs, and assignments — what's required and what can delay going live
How long do background checks and drug tests take?
Why is the background check taking longer than expected?
Health screenings and license checks for healthcare assignments (share this one with your workers)