When your practice is overloaded, bringing in a new physician can be a lifesaver. Spreading around the workload can prevent burnout and make your office sing with efficiency. There is, however, a problem — the length of time physician credentialing takes can be a real roadblock.
All physicians need to have their credentials assessed before starting a new practice, so you're undoubtedly familiar with the process, and you realize how frustrating it can be. As the practice owner, you need a person in your office working right now, and as the incoming doctor, you want to start as quickly as possible. This isn't even considering that credentialing might miss something vitally important or give you inaccurate information.
Using a virtual credentialing service through a platform like ViTel saves you time, helping you get your incoming physicians verified accurately and efficiently. Let's examine how a digital health platform can revolutionize your credentialing process.
Why credentialing is so slow
When you consider all the information needed to verify a physician's education, background, work history, and certifications, it's a wonder that people get verified to work. A typical physician credentialing checklist will include:
- Name
- Previous/other names
- Gender
- Ethnicity
- Mailing address
- Email address
- Daytime phone number
- Citizenship information
- Recent photograph
- Current CV
- Date of birth
- Social Security number
- Licensing
- Specialties
- Education and training
- Residency
- Specialty certificates
- Career history
- Patient age focus
- Languages spoken
- Hospital affiliations
- Medical group affiliation
- Practice address
- Practice Tax ID Number
- Practice phone number
- Primary practice contact
- National Provider Identifier (NPI) number
- Board certification
- Acceptance of new patients
- Sanctions or disciplinary actions
- Malpractice claims history
- Proof of professional liability insurance
- Continuing medical education documents
- Peer references
- Qualifications
For specializations or specific locales, there might be even more information that needs to be gathered. Considering that much of this information is disparate and needs to be drawn from individual places, you realize this process can take a long time. It's further confounded by needing to draw certain parts of this information — like education or work history — from multiple different sources on their own.
How digital credentialing can help
Digital credentialing makes the process faster and more streamlined. Typical paper-based credentialing requires contacting multiple places and waiting for someone to send you the necessary information. In the best-case scenario, this can take 30 days, but it's often longer — 60-90 days or more. There are many moving parts, and each needs to be vetted for accuracy. Human error can still mean the process is incorrect or delayed longer.
Digital credentialing services gather and manage information for physicians, keeping it up-to-date and ready to dispense to anyone who requests it. The data is accurate, current, and easily transmittable, making the process significantly faster and easier. You can make the onboarding process that much quicker when you have a repository of accurate, constantly updated information.
Simple, one-stop storage
With digital credentialing through a telehealth platform like ViTel, you can keep all the necessary information in a single place. Storing data on your office systems can be convoluted and requires you to update it and ensure you have a system in place, so nothing falls through the cracks. A digital credentialing system does all the organization and storage for you, taking the work out of your hands and the load off your mind.
Secure data handling
When credentialing a new hire, you deal with a tremendous amount of confidential data. An external digital credentialing platform will help you keep that information secure and safe, giving you and your physicians peace-of-mind. Additionally, digital credentialing is highly secure during transmission, preventing anyone from stealing your information.
Telehealth can help with more than just patient billing
From contacting patients for appointments to digital credentialing, hiring, and more, a robust telehealth platform is the future. Even if your practice is entirely brick-and-mortar, partnering with a telehealth platform like ViTel can help you with administrative tasks, hiring, insurance billing, credentialing, patient push notifications, marketing, and more. The less admin work you have to do, the more you can enjoy your actual work — healing patients and helping them thrive.
If you want to expand into virtual care or hire new doctors for your practice, you should see what ViTel offers. Discover the ViTel Health platform. A free essentials membership gives physicians a place to securely store their credentials online.
