This Post Authored By: Nicole Austin, Provider Enrollment Associate @ H3 Healthcare
Before joining H3 Healthcare, I spent a large part of my career in human resources and healthcare administration. I did not come into provider enrollment and credentialing with years of direct experience. What I did come with was years of experience being responsible for important records, deadlines, certifications, and compliance-related requirements without always having the right tools to manage them efficiently. And if I am being truthful, that was a major source of frustration for me. In my previous role we were somewhere in between paper and digital. Some things had been digitized, some things were still in binders, some lived in personnel files. My problem was not whether I had the information. More often, it was figuring out where it had been saved, who had access to it, and whether it was current.
The Hidden Cost of Searching
From the outside, searching for a certification or checking an expiration date doesn’t sound like a major operational issue. But when you are the person doing it over and over again, you start to see how much time disappears into those small tasks. Every interruption pulls someone away from another responsibility. An administrator stops what they are doing to search for a document. A provider is contacted for something they may have already submitted. A staff member checks a binder, then an inbox, then a shared drive. Individually, those moments may seem small but across a healthcare organization, they compound and eventually people become the system. Over time you begin to realize just how much time is being spent navigating the process instead of doing the work itself.
Joining H3
When I joined H3 Healthcare, I moved into a different area of healthcare administration: provider enrollment and credentialing. I want to make an important distinction here. Human resources compliance and provider credentialing and enrollment are not the same thing. The requirements are different, the processes are different, the stakeholders are different. But the feeling of trying to manage critical information across disconnected places? That part was very familiar. Healthcare organizations still need to know what they have and what is missing. What I began to see at H3 was the difference between simply having information and actually having visibility into it.
Elevate: A Central Hub That Changes More Than Where Files Are Stored
A big lesson I have carried with me is that storing a document is not the same as managing the responsibility connected to it. Before H3, I would have said the answer to my frustration was simple: digitize everything. That’s no longer the case because a digital mess is still a mess. What I have come to appreciate is the value of having a central hub where the work itself is visible. Through H3’s approach and the Elevate platform, provider information, documentation, tasks, activity, and reporting can be managed in a more connected way. From my view as someone doing this work every day, it matters because I am not relying only on my own memory to know what needs to happen next. I can see the work, therefore I can track the work and just as importantly, someone else does not have to come find me to understand the work. Elevate did not replace expertise, accountability, or good processes. It gave it a stronger foundation.
Giving Time Back to the People Doing the Work
We all can agree that time is valuable which is why the value of a centralized approach is not simply that information looks more organized. It’s what better organization gives back. It reduces unnecessary interruptions and helps leaders better understand progress without waiting for someone’s update. I appreciate that this system doesn’t just keep me organized, it gives me the ability to do my job more effectively which allows healthcare professionals more room to focus on the work that brought them into healthcare in the first place. I did not join H3 because I had spent my entire career in provider enrollment and credentialing. I joined with experience from another side of healthcare and with a very clear understanding of what fragmented processes can feel like for people trying to hold them together. I now get to see and experience what happens when the system is built to help carry that weight. Because “we have it somewhere” may mean the information exists but having the visibility and tools to manage it is where the difference begins.