There is a global shortage of Healthcare professionals leading to a surge in hiring including Nurses and Doctors. This has amplified the importance of workforce credentialing. Healthcare companies, whether they are hospitals or clinics, want to ensure that they are hiring genuine and qualified professionals, considering the criticality of the job.
When a facility hires healthcare professionals like physicians or nurses, they move them through the medical credentialing process. This is a formal process of verifying the qualifications, experience and other professional attributes of the healthcare professional.
Generally, healthcare organizations outsource this resource-intensive credentialing process or assign it to a dedicated in-house team. Some of the details verified include:
- Cross referencing of hospital affiliations
- Validating training and qualification certificates
- Confirming authenticity of medical licenses
The involvement of various stakeholders like hospitals, insurance agencies, training facilities, labs, etc., make the entire medical professional credentialing process complicated, expensive and tedious. There is always a looming risk of hiring personnel with fake licenses or certificates.
Due to criticality of the work performed, it becomes paramount for healthcare facilities to ensure that credentialing is not manipulated. Here is where blockchain technology can help. Before we take a look at how, let’s take a look at a few traits of blockchain technology.
Why move credentialing to Blockchain?
We know blockchain to be a distributed ledger of transactions. Each transaction is recorded in a block and linked to the one before and after it. Records or transactions secured on blockchain are:
Immutable – credentials issued on blockchain are hard to forge or modify as data present in a specific block is interlinked and traceable. Healthcare companies can confidently adopt blockchain technology.
Verifiable – a certificate, license, or letter issued on blockchain is accessible by all stakeholders. And, when shared, they are instantly verifiable. This enhances the level of trust in physicians and transparency of the health care system.
Shareable – documents secured on blockchain are socially shareable without having to worry about it being manipulated. This reduces the amount of time spent on validating and verifying a medical practitioner’s credentials.
How to Issue Medical Credentials on Blockchain?
Healthcare institutions can use the CredSure platform to issue any record, certificate or credential. CredSure is powered by blockchain and it enables organisations to log the credentials of their staff and optimise the background verification and hiring process.
The key benefits of CredSure are:
- Automate credentialing and onboarding: Healthcare institutions can issue and store documents on one easy-to-access platform. They can monitor various factors including document expiration dates, practice locations, and more, and generate alerts when documents are outdated.
- Standardise medical credentialing: Adopting blockchain to issue and verify staff credentials like clinical research license, insurance policy, etc., will standardise and harmonise medical credentials and level the playing field for all.
- Instant verification: Digital credentials issued via CredSure holds a verification link and QR code. They can be verified without the need of a third party from anywhere in the world.
- Save costs and increase efficiency: Blockchain can be the much-awaited opportunity for medical institutions, insurers, and healthcare providers to digitise credentials of past and existing staff. Thereby, automating repetitive tasks, eliminating delays in retrieving files and streamlining operations.
- Enhance credibility: Issuing and standardising credentials using blockchain will increase transparency and reassurance for all stakeholders involved.
- Prevent negligent credentialing: Securing all transactions on blockchain will prevent negligent credentialing and protect the organisation from unnecessary risks.
Issuing digital medical professional credentials as a healthcare organisation is not difficult at all. CredSure offers an accessible platform that eliminates the need for lengthy manual processes and applications. It replaces inefficiencies in manual systems and provides an end-to-end solution for creating, issuing and managing medical professional credentials.
Embracing blockchain technology is becoming a necessity, considering the spike of forged medical certifications throughout the industry. We urge healthcare companies to seriously consider issuing medical professional related documents on blockchain, saving time and cost, on top of everything, safety of patients.
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