The new innovation driving greater efficiencies and faster placements
By Eric Ly, Co-founder and CEO of KarmaCheck
Why is the healthcare industry continually allocating its limited credentialing time and resources to verifying candidates’ degrees, employment histories, or other credentials multiple times?
Countless credentialing and compliance leaders have wrestled with this question for decades. After all, how can we meaningfully improve time-to-fill with so much inefficiency plaguing the background check and credentialing process?
Healthcare staffing, for example, requires a dizzying number of credentialing steps that become repetitive and expensive as firms hire the same candidates for multiple placements. And health systems across the US can take months to gather and verify physician credentials.
All that will change very soon.
Today, I’m excited to announce KarmaCheck Wallet, our credential wallet. We originally founded KarmaCheck years ago with many of these ideas in mind, and we’re thrilled to see them finally come to fruition in this form. Through this transformative technology, we’re aiming to eliminate redundant steps in healthcare staffing and to dramatically reduce credentialing time in health systems.
With KarmaCheck Wallet’s expedited turnaround times and operational advantages, healthcare credentialing will never look the same.
What is a credential wallet? And why does it matter now?
A credential wallet offers a secure, digital repository where healthcare professionals’ verified credentials are stored. This includes everything from education and certifications to employment and immunization histories. Consider a healthcare staffing agency that typically orders redundant background checks with each new placement. A credential wallet allows certain credentials to be verified once and reused at the candidate’s discretion.
This approach reduces delays in hiring and helps ensure that qualified clinicians can meet their start dates. KarmaCheck Wallet achieves these goals by shifting credentialing teams’ time from tedious manual work like chasing paper to higher-value activities such as implementing talent acquisition process improvements and providing the “human touch” that clinicians truly value. We’re making hiring faster, more cost-effective, and less burdensome, allowing healthcare providers to focus on what truly matters: patient care.
As I’ve highlighted in SIA’s upcoming The Credentialing Revolution: Merging High Tech with High Touch report, healthcare staffing is at a crossroads. Nearly 30% of travel nurses are considering leaving the profession altogether, bill rates are down, and demand for clinicians has softened. While firms are doing everything in their power to recruit and retain talent, those efforts have their limits.
Credentialing has received less attention, investment, and innovation than its front-office counterparts. Yet credentialing reform is crucial to improving the candidate experience in healthcare — and the bottom line. According to a recent survey conducted by Andros, only 29% of healthcare providers reported being satisfied with their credentialing experience. Also, when you consider that travel nurses must typically undergo this laborious process every 13 weeks, the competitive advantage of streamlining credentialing becomes evident. Not to mention the operational and line-item savings associated with running fewer screenings.
How KarmaCheck Wallet removes work from the credentialing process
Our vision is to eliminate the inefficiencies that directly affect turnaround times from background checks and credentialing in healthcare. We will empower our customers in three key ways:
- Providing one platform to house verified credentials and run background checks. KarmaCheck Wallet stores verified credentials and candidate-uploaded documents, and it’s built within our industry-leading background check platform. This combination enables your team to manage the end-to-end screening and credentialing process using one solution. To ensure they’re not wading through extraneous documentation, KarmaCheck Wallet displays only the items relevant for each job.
- Reusing verified screenings that have an extended shelf life. Historical information such as education, past employment, and immunization history does not change over time and, therefore, should not require frequent re-verification. Reusing recently verified historical data stored in the KarmaCheck Wallet decreases the time and back-and-forth candidates and credentialing teams endure. When a candidate verifies these types of credentials through KarmaCheck once, a compliance team can see when various screenings were performed, allowing them to intelligently decide when to reuse them and when updated checks should be re-run.
- Achieving these benefits with little or no change management required. Teams that are already accustomed to operating background check and credentialing platforms can enjoy all of the Wallet’s benefits without changing their workflow.
Our data shows that 9% to 15% of a typical healthcare staffing firm’s candidates are already eligible for screening reuse. We expect the user base for screening reuse will grow significantly larger over time. Decreasing repetitive checks on those eligible candidates translates into faster turnaround times and real cost savings as background verification fees, typically charged per placement, are reduced. These changes enable staffing companies that use KarmaCheck Wallet to become more competitive.
In the future, we envision KarmaCheck Wallet will enable candidates to store and update more of their documents that are valuable in the credentialing process — such as reference checks and skills assessments — right from their phone.
I invite you to follow us on LinkedIn or contact us directly to learn more. If you’re planning to attend the 2024 SIA Healthcare Staffing Summit taking place Nov. 6 – 8, we’d be honored to show you more during an in-person meeting at the event.
Join us in our mission to help clinicians provide quality care faster by speeding up and simplifying credentialing with KarmaCheck Wallet. Together, we can improve onboarding for every healthcare organization and clinician.
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