Healthcare License Management and Monitoring

To avoid hiring and engaging unlicensed or sanctioned individuals, ongoing license verification and monitoring is critical. In healthcare, nothing is more damaging than employing a clinician without the proper skills and training to practice at your facility. Failing to properly verify or monitor licenses and certifications will not only result in non-compliance with state and federal rules and accreditation standards, but it will also put patients and staff at risk.

Here are five do’s and don’ts that will aid in your license verification and monitoring initiatives.

Today’s demanding healthcare environment pressures employers to explore more effective and efficient means to manage licenses and certifications. Manual record systems, like spreadsheets and checklists, are cumbersome and expend invaluable time that can be used to address other key issues affecting healthcare organizations, such as improving patient outcomes and readmission rates.

While hospitals and other healthcare organizations generally aren’t required to run time-of-hire or ongoing background checks, they often do as part of their voluntary due diligence procedures and to mitigate their liability risk. Some states do require background checks for candidates for certain healthcare positions, but organizations typically run them on all staff members.

This February, we are celebrating the 10th Anniversary of LicenseManager Pro, PreCheck’s healthcare license management system. Since its debut in 2005, we’ve been committed to providing healthcare organizations with a comprehensive, streamlined credentialing system to aid in the tedious process of monitoring expired licenses and certifications. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with our development team to discuss how LicenseManager Pro came to be and how it has evolved over the past 10 years.

The consequences of negligent credentialing can be costly to a healthcare organization and its medical staff services department. Organizations that want to renew their focus on credentialing can follow several best practices to protect themselves and ensure they’re doing all they can to remain compliant.

To commemorate National Medical Staff Services Awareness Week, November 2-8, 2014, I sat down with PreCheck’s Director of Credentialing Programs, Dionne Austin to discuss the latest trends in medical staff services and her advice for medical services professionals (MSPs) in 2015 and beyond.

FBI fingerprint background checks have gained popularity. When it comes to state legislation regarding background screening requirements for healthcare organizations like home health agencies, for example, FBI background checks are one of the most commonly required types of searches. If legislators are consistently requiring them, they must be a comprehensive background check, right?

An effective license verification and management process can not only ensure patient safety for healthcare organizations, but it can also ensure compliance with accreditation standards and minimize the risk of overpayments. The following are five best practices for effective healthcare license verification and monitoring.

Typically, my blogs are devoted to discussing compliance topics, covering emerging regulations, or highlighting best practices. But today, I’d like to share with our readers some of the true thrills of our job. At PreCheck, we identify ourselves as a “background investigations and credentialing firm.” Our tag line is “investigate further.” All of our employees are licensed private investigators. Hopefully you’ve identified the common denominator.

The rules surrounding the Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC) and how it applies to the day to day roles of nurse employers and administrators can be quite confusing. Some questions for someone new to a nurse employment role may include the following: