SkillSurvey® Automates Steps in Credentialing Healthcare Professionals

Wayne, PA (PRWEB) October 07, 2013

SkillSurvey®, the inventor of online reference-checking software for human resource professionals, has introduced a new solution to support the medical staff services departments of hospitals and other healthcare provider organizations in validating the competencies of physicians and allied health workers. The software solution, Credential360™, leverages the state-of-the-art reference assessment technology behind Pre-Hire 360™ to obtain responses from peer references faster.

With this solution, SkillSurvey helps eliminate peer referencing and delineations of privileges as the bottlenecks that prevent medical staff services teams from presenting completed credentialing packets to approval committees.

In the effort to ensure patient safety, The Joint Commission, DNV, NCQA, and other accreditation organizations require that healthcare providers review, cross-check, and verify the credentials provided by physicians and allied health providers before they are granted privileges to practice at their organization. One of the most time-consuming steps in this process—and the one that causes the most costly delays—is gathering feedback from peer references on a practitioner's core competencies in the context of a requested delineation of clinical privileges.

“Typically, medical staff services departments contact peer references as part of the credentialing process after recruiters have already approached many of the same references for feedback when assessing the candidate for hire,” explained Ray Bixler, president and chief executive officer of SkillSurvey. “All too often, this second—yet vital—reference request for credentialing goes unanswered for weeks and even months. This poses a serious problem for provider organizations. They risk delays in hiring that can result in talent slipping away and it affects revenue since that practitioner is unable to see and bill patients until credentialed.”

The cost of just one week’s delay in credentialing the average primary care physician can amount to over $30,000 in lost revenue due to an inability to bill. For a hospital hiring 50 primary care physicians annually, such a delay can cost over $1.5 million.

SkillSurvey's new software enables healthcare organizations to:

•     Boost revenue by allowing practitioners to bill sooner
•     Reduce administrative inefficiencies and their associated costs
•     Free credentialing staff to focus on more valued-added activities
•     Prevent quality hires from slipping away

Through Credential360™, references receive a reference request via e-mail with a link to a role-specific survey on the candidate’s skills, behaviors, and performance, along with a delineation of privileges. References can complete feedback entirely online and the resulting candidate reports are produced in such a way that credentialing specialists can easily incorporate them into packets presented to credentialing committees.

Using Credential360™, credentialing specialists simply have to enter the contact information and select the provider’s discipline and the system automates the rest by reaching out to and presenting each provider and reference with online versions of each hospital’s own reference and privileging forms. No more manual mailing, emailing, faxing, printing, or scanning.

For more information, contact Steve Heister, vice president of product management, at sheister(at)skillsurvey(dot)com, or at 610-947-6300, ext. 1276.

About SkillSurvey, Inc.
SkillSurvey is the inventor of online reference-checking. Its social talent platform allows recruiters and hiring managers to collect feedback from references on a candidate’s behaviors and past work performance, and source talent by turning references into candidates. The information, all confidentially gathered through enterprise software, is used to make better hiring decisions, predict future work performance, and improve recruiter efficiency. This patent-pending approach to reference assessments is based on over 30 years of research in job competency modeling. SkillSurvey was named one of the fastest-growing companies in America by Inc. magazine, and was named a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 firm. Visit SkillSurvey at http://www.skillsurvey.com, and on Facebook and Twitter.

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