Hospitals and healthcare centers are in strong competition for skilled physicians and nurses. That puts added pressure on the credentialing process. Fortunately, the process has been made easier thanks to electronic access to data.
As director of credentialing at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine and UNC Health Care, Linda Waldorf knows personally the importance of onboarding a new hire as quickly as possible. Waldorf is a new employee herself. She joined UNC only five months ago, from John Hopkins Health System.
In her new position with UNC, Waldorf is charged with screening and credentialing hires for a health system that includes 11 hospitals and approximately 4,700 physicians. There are five hospitals on the UNC campus, and another six across the state. Another hospital is getting ready to join the group.
Credentialing starts at the very outset of the hiring process, Waldorf said, when the candidate completes an extensive application. This includes all of the basics on a candidate’s work history, education and training. It may also include professional and personal references.
Waldorf said the credentialing team used to collect a lot more information on the application, but now they check out websites, including the databases of professional associations, and use web crawls to gather information. “We will find information on malpractice suits, insurance claims and actions taken against a physician,” Waldorf said.
Having access to so much information electronically makes the gap analysis part of the credentialing process – seeing where there are holes in a physician’s career record based on what information is publicly available – easier and more effective than a paper application or reference form, where a candidate can work around intentional lapses.
“You’re just trying to weed out that 3 to 5 percent,” Waldorf said. “A problem doctor doesn’t tell you everywhere they’ve been, or every action taken against them.”
The process can be time-consuming, but the results are worth it if it means gaining access to important information that a recruiter or hiring manager might otherwise miss, or be shielded from.
For those healthcare organizations that really want to leave no stone unturned, and/or speed up the credentialing process as much as possible, there are digital credentialing tools.
Where digital credentialing tools can serve the greatest good, said SkillSurvey CEO Ray Bixler and Vice President of Product Development Steve Heister, is in speeding up the process of gathering referrals. SkillSurvey offers a digital credentialing tool called Credential360, which automates the entire credentialing process for newly hired physicians and practitioners.
Much of the basic job, training and education information on a candidate can be easily obtained online, as Waldorf noted, but referrals and references are not that easy, Bixler and Heister said. By enlisting the aid of the candidate in gathering that information and getting it online into a digital tool, the entire credentialing process can be handled quickly.
Another benefit of using digital credentialing tools, said Heister, is that employers can analyze the data inputted into the tools in a variety of ways, enabling them to benchmark results against other healthcare employers. This helps the organization assess the type of candidate they are attracting versus their peers.