Onboarding a new provider should be an occurrence to celebrate! But oftentimes the arrival of a new clinical resource adds significant stress and workload to the administrative team. The reason for this is of course due to one word: enrollment. Numerous entities the practice is associated with – from payors, to facilities, to malpractice insurance companies – require a highly detailed set of background information about the new provider in order to credential them with the practice. And until this process is complete, the clinician can’t start seeing patients.
The information required by a given party can vary widely, but typically includes: detailed job history, educational background, peer references, and often even copies of every state medical license the provider has ever held, whether current or not. In working with our customer teams, we discovered, not surprisingly, that gathering this amount of information and supporting documentation was a time consuming and frequently frustrating process. In a recent survey1, 93% of practices reported delays of at least 30 days, with some citing up to six months or more of new providers forced to either not work at all, or just shadow colleagues, while waiting for their paperwork to be finalized.
From the clinician’s perspective, during this time, requests for data would often come from multiple sources (payor and facility credentialing, for example, likely fall to different individuals, or even separate teams in larger practices), and would commonly be for copies of the same information. Provider responses too would vary in format from email, to fax, to even postal mail. Worst of all, onboarding represents the provider’s initial set of interactions with a new practice, giving a first impression of disorganization, immediately after offer signing. The entire experience felt inefficient and outdated.
With that in mind, H3 set out to reinvent the provider onboarding process. We built a streamlined, web and mobile optimized, user friendly application, which our customers now leverage to gather the detailed information they need from their new clinical team members. In place of emails, we’ve created structured form fields. We’ve swapped out faxes and stacks of paper copies for secure file uploads. And we’ve replaced mailed wet signatures with our proprietary e-signature integration.
H3’s onboarding tool reduces provider information gathering time by 43%, on average, allowing clinicians to start generating revenue sooner, and most importantly, seeing patients weeks or even months before they would in the non-H3 world. A once aggravating and disorganized experience has been replaced with a delightful first interaction between the practice and the new team member. We’re excited to bring this technology to your team; contact us today for more information about how H3 can help.
[1] Source: 2023 Recruitment Process Report via Association for Advancing Physician and Provider Recruitment (AAPPR)