Urgent care centers across the country are grappling with a staffing crisis. High patient demand, combined with clinician shortages and burnout, has left many clinics scrambling to recruit and retain qualified providers. In this climate, delays in credentialing and onboarding new staff exacerbate the problem – every day a hire isn’t cleared to work is a day the clinic remains short-staffed. This blog explores the workforce challenges urgent care providers face and how a smarter approach to credentialing, leveraging automation through platforms like Credentially, can help solve them.

Urgent Care’s Workforce Shortage

Staffing challenges in healthcare are widespread, but urgent care has unique vulnerabilities. These clinics operate with small, “skeletal” teams – often just a couple of providers and support staff on duty – and depend on patient volume (for instance, flu season surges) to stay profitable. Labor is one of the highest costs, and when even one provider slot is vacant, it directly impacts patient throughput and revenue. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic intensified staffing issues. During the peak of COVID, urgent cares saw patient volumes skyrocket over 58% above normal in 2020, leading to extreme stress on staff. In the aftermath, many healthcare workers reached burnout. Over 230,000 medical professionals quit their positions in 2021, including physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants, and an additional 117,000 clinicians left the profession entirely in that year. Alarmingly, nearly 47% of all healthcare workers plan to leave their current jobs by 2025, according to a Forbes report.

For urgent care centers, this means a shrinking pool of providers and rising turnover. Clinics often resort to temporary locum tenens providers to fill gaps, but reliance on temp staff can create a transitory environment and even impact care quality

High turnover and constant recruitment cycles are now the norm. Every urgent care operator is competing to hire from the same limited pool of clinicians, making speed in hiring and onboarding a critical advantage

The Credentialing Bottleneck

One often-overlooked factor worsening the staffing crunch is the slow, paper-heavy process of credentialing new providers. Before a doctor, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant can start seeing patients, they must be credentialed with the urgent care’s payers and verified for licenses, certifications, and background. This process is notoriously lengthy – averaging 60 to 180 days for many healthcare organizations. In urgent care, a 2–6 month delay to onboard a provider is untenable when patient demand is immediate. Every week of delay leaves clinics understaffed, burdening existing clinicians or forcing the clinic to limit services.

Traditional credentialing involves countless manual steps: phone tag for references, form submissions to insurance networks, primary source verifications of licenses, and data entry into multiple systems. Mistakes or omissions in any of these steps can reset the clock. Common errors like incomplete paperwork or missed payer requirements further drag out the timeline. The result is a frustrating limbo where a hired clinician is eager to work (and patients need care), but scheduling them is impossible due to red tape.

These delays have real consequences on staffing: a provider stuck in credentialing cannot alleviate the workload from colleagues or expand clinic capacity. In worst-case scenarios, slow credentialing can cause a newly hired clinician to give up and accept another job elsewhere. Additionally, ongoing credential maintenance can trip up staffing – if a provider’s license or DEA registration quietly expires because of administrative oversight, that provider may suddenly be unable to work until resolved. In a fast-paced urgent care setting, missing a re-credentialing deadline or license renewal can instantly remove a provider from the schedule, impacting staffing levels and patient care.

Filling the Gaps with Smarter Credentialing

To address staffing shortages, urgent care organizations need to accelerate the onboarding of new hires and prevent avoidable lapses with current staff. This is where smarter credentialing comes in. By using an automated credentialing platform like Credentially, clinics can dramatically shorten the time it takes to credential providers and reduce the manual workload on HR teams. The goal is to get qualified clinicians in the door and seeing patients as quickly as possible, with full confidence in their compliance.

Ways Automated Credentialing Eases the Staffing Crunch:

• Faster Onboarding of New Providers: Automation can cut credentialing times from months to weeks – or even days. For example, a multi-location urgent care group achieved an 80% reduction in new provider onboarding time after adopting a credentialing software solution. Tasks that used to happen sequentially (license verification, background check, payer enrollment) can occur in parallel and with far less back-and-forth. A process that might have taken 60+ days can be compressed dramatically. Getting clinicians on the floor faster means open positions are filled sooner, easing the strain on remaining staff and enabling clinics to handle patient demand.
• Reduced Administrative Burden on Staff: Credentialing a single provider can take 10 or more hours of staff time when done manually. In a busy urgent care, those are hours staff could spend recruiting candidates or supporting clinical operations. Smarter credentialing tools automate data collection and form filling – pulling license info from databases, sending electronic forms to references – so that HR managers and medical directors aren’t bogged down with tedious paperwork. By automating these tasks, Credentially frees up your team’s time to focus on interviewing candidates or improving clinic workflows, rather than chasing documents. This not only accelerates hiring but also helps prevent burnout among administrative staff by lightening their workload.
• Maintaining Continuous Provider Eligibility: Automated systems like Credentially ensure that once providers are onboard, they stay compliant with all requirements. The software will send alerts for upcoming license or certification expirations and even pre-populate renewal applications. This proactive approach means clinicians aren’t benched due to an overlooked expiration date. For example, if a physician’s DEA license renewal is due, the platform flags it well in advance and guides the update process. The result is no sudden gaps in staffing because a provider’s credentials lapsed unnoticed. In a crisis where every provider counts, this feature is invaluable to maintain full staffing.
• Improved Provider Experience and Retention: A fast, organized onboarding process sets a positive tone for new hires. Physicians and NPs who join an urgent care want to start work quickly and easily. With smart credentialing, much of the onerous form-filling is handled digitally, and clinicians can submit necessary info through an online portal at their convenience. This smooth experience can boost provider satisfaction. In fact, a case study showed that automating credentialing reduced administrative burden for providers and staff, enhancing overall satisfaction. Happier providers are more likely to stay with the organization, improving retention. Instead of being frustrated by delays or bureaucratic hurdles, they feel supported by an efficient process – an important factor when nearly half of healthcare workers are considering leaving jobs.

By implementing Credentially’s streamlined credentialing platform, urgent care operators gain a strategic tool to combat the staffing crisis. Credentially automates the entire credentialing and onboarding journey, from collecting a provider’s documents to integrating with insurance enrollment systems. This means new hires can often be cleared to see patients in a fraction of the time it once took, alleviating staffing shortages sooner. Additionally, existing staff are less taxed by admin duties and less likely to burn out. In an urgent care environment where every extra provider on the schedule makes a difference, smarter credentialing translates directly into better-staffed clinics and more resilient operations.

Ultimately, while credentialing alone cannot solve the national workforce shortage, it is a powerful lever that urgent care organizations control internally. By removing credentialing bottlenecks, clinics can more rapidly bring in the talent they recruit and ensure all hands remain on deck. In a time of severe healthcare staffing challenges, leveraging Credentially for efficient, automated credentialing is a smart move that yields more clinicians at work, higher morale, and the ability to care for more patients in need.

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