As a healthcare staffing firm, the expertise and performance of the clinicians you provide your clients need to be irrefutable. Patients rely on exceptional care and healthcare facilities depend on top-notch medical professionals to mitigate their legal risk. The credentialing process helps ensure clinicians have the necessary licensure, education, certifications, and experience to be a qualified provider at a healthcare facility. That said, two-thirds of healthcare leaders say these detailed, and facility-specific, processes are extremely labor intensive and can span upwards of five weeks. To streamline their progress and lower costs, many healthcare organizations and healthcare staffing firms are redefining their credentialing roles and process flows to reduce turnaround time and lower credentialing costs per candidate. Here’s how:
Achieve Greater Accuracy and Speed at a Reduced Cost
Many healthcare staffing companies are specializing resources to be able to drive higher efficiency and improve the quality of the candidate and healthcare facility experience. To do this, they often create specialty roles within their credentialing organization such as the following:
Credentialing Analyst – The credentialing analyst is ultimately responsible for the clinician and healthcare facility experience during the credentialing process. They work with the facility to determine their needs, and then build a customized requirements checklist for the specific clinician being onboarded. They then review the checklist with the clinician and carefully manage any obstacles or exceptions that arise as the clinician undergoes the process of providing the needed documentation and references. After all credentialing activities are complete, the analyst delivers the candidate package to the facility.
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Reference Coordinator – The reference coordinator is responsible for completing all reference checks necessary to place the clinician. This can include past and present clinical supervisor references as well as employment and education verification. In some instances, reference check automation software is leveraged.
Credentialing Coordinator – The credentialing coordinator works closely with the credentialing analyst and is responsible for receiving, reviewing and interpreting, and validating all ifor stagingments. They are also responsible for staging and compiling all necessary documents to be provided to the healthcare facility in the clinician’s credentialing package.
With the specialization of resources, healthcare companies are able to hire resources best fit for the activities associated with each role. In particular, reference coordinator and credentialing coordinator roles are often outsourced, while onshore credentialing resources are moved into credentialing analyst roles.
Case Study. A top 10 healthcare staffing company was initially hesitant to outsource credentialing because of the suspected liability, but its tendency for decreased margins across verticals made the prospect of reducing SG&A too promising to ignore. Outsourced credentialing support could help verify clinicians’ references, education, specific certifications, licensure, and work history while also managing the plethora of documents associated with these activities.
Since implementing our offshore credentialing support services program, our offshore team of recruitment coordinators have helped onboard over 50,000 clinicians and conducted over 200,000 reference checks and verification of employment to help place those candidates. Here’s a look at what else outsourced credentialing support services helped this staffing firm achieve:
- Cost reduction of reference checks by over 60%
- Savings of over $1.5 million annually
- Improved turnaround time to complete references by 50%
- Performance improvements of all key metrics beyond historic measures
Delivering Results
Which processes enable companies to save on credentialing related expenses while keeping risks low? Working with our portfolio of healthcare clients, we have identified specific activities, metrics, technologies, and roles necessary to drive quality improvements, turnaround time and savings.
Mitigating liability is always a primary concern, so it’s important for offshore recruitment coordinators to adhere to a specific process that delivers results. At PSG, we handle all of the calls for reference checks and verification of employment. We run background checks through appropriate channels and receive e-fax responses to put in a centralized data repository. We set up drug screen events, run license verification, and file all necessary documents such as state licenses, TB tests, and criminal background checks in the client’s system to ensure that all the necessary documents are in place to put the healthcare professional to work.
If there are any exceptions that fall outside of our strict set of rules, our offshore resources escalate all requests to an onshore credentialing analyst who reviews them to ensure no risk is associated with placing a specific healthcare provider. All of our resources work efficiently and carefully following the guidelines provided.
Additionally, proactive measures like attributing or labeling candidates in an ATS enable companies to better search for clinicians based on specific skill sets as well as to better allocate those candidates to assigned recruiters.
If your teams are strapped for time and credentialing delays are hindering the productivity of your overall operations, redefining your credentialing roles and processes may be the solution you’ve been waiting for.
