Medical Staff Services

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced how and where the medical staff services industry operated and how credentialing professionals perform their work.

As we look to 2023, as well as National Medical Staff Service Awareness Week from Nov. 6 to 12, medical staff services face unresolved issues related to how healthcare employers handle remote work arrangements, telemedicine implementation, and physician competencies verifications.

With the growing prevalence of telemedicine comes a growing risk of fraud.

An entire healthcare organization can benefit when medical staff services and HR align.

A medical staff services office comprises medical staff professionals (MSPs) and credentialing specialists. They are responsible for credentialing and privileging medical staff members, keeping up with medical staff bylaws, and more.

In contrast, HR managers and employees are often responsible for promoting employee hiring and retention initiatives, managing financial matters such as payroll, and making sure healthcare regulations are followed.

Since the pandemic began, roles have been moved around within healthcare systems to fill urgent needs. Clinicians have been overworked and fatigued, and all of this disruption has affected patient safety outcomes. Preventable central-line associated bloodstream infections, for example, have risen 51% compared to pre-pandemic rates.

Dr. Christopher Duntsch, colloquially known as “Dr. Death,” botched operations on nearly three dozen people. These adverse events resulted in the deaths of two patients before criminal proceedings finally put an end to his power. With such poor outcomes, why was Duntsch allowed to operate on so many patients before intervention came?

The COVID pandemic disrupted healthcare as we knew it. But healthcare systems are taking advantage of the pandemic-driven upheaval to accelerate changes to the way they work. According to a report from Deloitte, only 9% of healthcare employees indicated that employers were innovating new ways of working before COVID-19, compared with 78% since the pandemic began.

Medical services professionals (MSPs) are the gatekeepers of patient safety. That will never change. But everything else about the MSP role is evolving rapidly, with those adjustments accelerating exponentially during the COVID pandemic.

Medical staff services (MSS) professionals will continue to face several changes and challenges moving into 2021. Having different standards for privileging and credentialing at each healthcare facility complicates matters. Streamlining and standardizing your MSS processes could result in increased efficiency, improved patient outcomes and more consistent data across your healthcare system.

From disaster privileging to credentialing by proxy and beyond, COVID-19 has profoundly affected medical staff services professionals’ (MSSP) operations and obligations.

Many healthcare organizations adopted telemedicine for the first time during COVID-19, introducing a wave of process changes. Assessing healthcare providers’ competencies and licenses without meeting them in person was new to many, but a wider adoption of credentialing by proxy makes the process more accessible.