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.

Do:

1. Integrate HRIS Systems

A growing number of healthcare organizations are upgrading their payroll and human resource information systems (HRIS) to ensure they receive real-time, automated alerts of employees with current and approaching expired licenses to mitigate risk and costly compliance fees. Additionally, these systems help facilitate communication across functional areas and allow healthcare organizations to collect information from multiple sources to facilitate strategic planning.

2. Partner with a Third-Party Expert

When you partner with a third-party license verification screening firm like PreCheck that specializes in credentialing and license monitoring, you gain access to a list of benefits such as primary source verifications, automated tools and notices and seamless onboarding processes. Additionally, it can free up your invaluable time to focus on other key issues affecting healthcare, such as patient safety and care.

3. Meet Accreditation Standards

If you’re an accredited healthcare organization, you must keep up with strict compliance and license verification rules and standards imposed by accrediting bodies such as The Joint Commission (TJC). For example, TJC staffing standard (HR.01.02.07, EP 2) states: “When law or regulation requires care providers to be currently licensed, certified, or registered to practice their professions, the hospital both verifies these credentials with the primary source and documents this verification when a provider is hired and when his or her credentials are renewed.” The intent of the standard is to lower the risk of fraudulent credentials while ensuring that an individual has the correct qualifications for the duties they perform.

Don’t:

1. Neglect the Importance of Ongoing License Monitoring

Even if you’ve conducted the required initial checks on current employees, as a best practice, it’s recommended that healthcare organizations continue monitoring their staff’s licenses on a monthly basis, or quarterly at a minimum, says Dionne Austin, Director of Credentialing Programs at PreCheck. The laws and standards of hospital overseers require proof and documentation of the timely renewal of required licenses and/or certifications for healthcare workers. TJC standard, HSHR.1, also calls for organizations to have processes in place to ensure “a person’s qualifications are consistent with his or her assignment(s).”

2. Forget What’s at Stake

Healthcare license verification and monitoring is a key component in meeting current compliance requirements and creating an en effecting hiring policy. Getting credentialing wrong can expose your organization to costly fines and even in some cases, taint your organization’s reputation. It is expensive, not only in terms of costs of defending the credentialing process, but also if the failure to properly credential a practitioner is the reason a patient is harmed, says Margret J. Lowery, of Lowery Law.

Not knowing your staff’s current license staff can put your healthcare organization at considerable risk. Are you currently reviewing your organization’s license management process? Contact us today to learn how LicenseManager Pro can help streamline your license verification process.