Medical Credentialing Services in 2022

Post-pandemic, healthcare, and social care sectors in the UK have been forced to adjust to a "new normal".

Due to underfunding, budgets and resources are shrinking. Additionally, the industry faces unprecedented resource challenges that managing a pandemic creates.

Yet, at the same time, there is a rising demand for services and increased flexibility in how services are delivered.

Discussions are being had in healthcare organisations up and down the country on how they can adapt to meet these challenges, specifically, how care is delivered and what impact today's challenges are having on the quality of patient care.

As we emerge from the pandemic, organisations increasingly recognise the need to lean on technology-led transformation. More and more healthcare providers rely on platforms such as Credentially to support them as they adapt to this new normal.

The role of technology-led credentialing during the pandemic

At Credentially, we recognised that we could have a role to play in supporting the healthcare industry during the pandemic. As the first wave of COVID-19 hit the UK, our NHS faced an unprecedented demand for services whilst suffering from excessive shortages in staff.

The UK government set up the COVID-19 Clinical Assessment Service (CCAS) to meet this challenge. Credentially supported the CCAS as a technology partner assisting any NHS provider as they looked to quickly onboard the emergency workforce.

During this period, Credentially provided our platform to CCAS so they could scale their processing of candidates from 50 to over 1000 per week. This represented an increase of over 1900%.

Post pandemic, healthcare providers are looking to adapt to the" new normal" and ensure they have the mechanisms in place to meet the demands of future strains of their resources. They recognise the need to lean on medical credentialing services and software in terms of medical credentialing. They are turning to platforms like Credentially. 

Understanding the "new normal."

Over the last decade, there has been a shift towards telemedicine and the provision of healthcare and social care outside traditional healthcare facilities, utilising more satellite and community care. The pandemic has only accelerated this movement. 

The average healthcare provider is now required to have a flexible workforce in multiple locations, which they can deploy to meet the ever-changing. This increases the pressure on credentialing teams' to meet these demands.

Technology and medical credentialing

In this guide, we will explore the role that technology plays in recruiting and onboarding patient-facing medical staff. We will use the Credentially platform as a point of reference because it was designed specifically for medical credentialing by industry experts who understand the complexity and nuances of the various processes.

Automating labour-intensive activities

From city hospitals to your average local medical practice, the pandemic has underlined how traditional manual credentialing has limitations when looking to scale.

Manual credentialing is a very resource-heavy process that requires trained experts. It is difficult to recruit experienced credentialing staff and train new staff at scale. It's often a thankless and stressful task.

Deploying a medical credentialing platform that automates and manages several processes, including DBS checks, referencing and follow-up communication with applicants, solves a lot of problems. There is less reliance on resources to manage the data administration tasks required in manual provider credentialing.

This leaves credentialing teams free to manage real-time resource management and compliance risk strategically.

Managing personal data safely.

In today's GDPR workplace, personal data needs to be secured at every step of the process. Having medical credentialing teams dealing with physical documentation and paperwork during initial credentialing and various spreadsheets makes data management challenges.

Implementing a platform for credentialing gives teams the ability to manage the process digitally. A platform like Credentially meets all security and data regulations and keeps healthcare centres fully compliant.

Our clients can integrate the recruitment process into the platform. Job adverts placed on websites, job boards and social media can be quickly integrated into the platform so the entire process can be managed from one dashboard keeping all data in one secure place.

Applicants can upload copies of documentation, so you don't need to track personal data within your organisation, ensuring you stay GDPR compliant.

Efficiency is critical 

To scale quickly whilst remaining compliant, efficiency becomes a key metric. Traditional manual medical credentialing requires staff to be able to track hundreds, sometimes thousands of applications and resources at various stages of the credentialing process. 

Often reminder messages are required to enable speedy credentialing. It is a thankless task to ask new credentialing staff to manually track each process and send reminders on time. This headache becomes redundant with the right medical credentialing software implemented. 

The right medical provider credentialing service, like the Credentially platform, automates applicant and organisation communication, including sending regular reminders to applicants asking for missing documentation or information. 

This saves hundreds of hours and ensures the credentialing process is completed as quickly as possible, allowing healthcare organisations to deploy credential resources quicker. 

Managing compliance 

For most of this article, we have been focusing on how technology can support medical credentialing teams in the initial credentialing of a nurse practitioner and physician. 

However, there is an ongoing requirement to ensure deployed medical resources are re-credentialled when legally required to do so. Failure to successfully re-credential resources will mean that healthcare organisations are not compliant. 

Most importantly, this puts patient safety at risk. The general public has an expectation that all medical staff have been vetted and remain qualified and certified to deliver treatment. 

A platform like Credentially manages the re-credentialing process for their clients. Additionally, it gives credentialing teams real-time data both strategically and at a resource level allowing for teams to make appropriate decisions that help keep them compliant. 

Takeaways

The "new normal" for health and social care is putting an additional burden on credentialing experts. Using traditional paperwork and spreadsheet processes, even with best practices employed, just won't allow organisations to scale or react to changing circumstances.

Organisations are relying on technology to fill the gap. With the right technology in place, the recruitment of a healthcare professional becomes automated. A credentialing specialist can focus on managing resources and making real-time resource decisions with the information they need at their fingertips.

From initial credentialing application to re-credentialing, the entire process can be managed from within the platform, meaning all personal data is stored in one secure location, easing the burden of trying to manage personal data. If it's a platform like Credentially, then the platform will be fully compliant with all regulations.

Most importantly, it speeds up the process of credentialing significantly and at scale. So should a healthcare organisation need to react to a pandemic or just be able to provide more flexibility, they have the system in place to be able to make these changes in real-time without risking the quality of care and staying compliant.