Streamlining Credentialing for Integrated Urgent Care

Urgent care providers across the UK, are becoming increasingly frustrated with time-consuming and manual processes associated with hiring, onboarding, and credentialing when recruiting clinical professionals. There is a clinical workforce shortage of nearly 84,000 FTE staff and even when candidates are available, recruiting clinicians is not a quick and simple task as urgent care providers also need to ensure they’re following the relevant competency, skills and behaviour checks in line with the Integrated Urgent Care Workforce Blueprint.

Urgent care provider HUC had identified that there was an increase in demand on time and resources needed to fill vacant roles from applicant processing and tracking to onboarding successful candidates once hired.

“Before we started to use Credentially, we struggled in several areas. It felt like we were constantly chasing references, documentation and applications."
Deirdre Saliba, Head of HR, Strategy, and In-Sourcing, HUC

Head of HR, Strategy and In-Sourcing at HUC, Deirdre Saliba was keen to highlight just how frustrating it was for them having to continually chase documentation and references, which slowed down the process and proved to be a hindrance for clinicians, as she explains; "it's not easy for people to scan documents and references remotely and the fact that Credentially can turn photographs into documents, just makes life easier for all involved."

Having identified the need to create efficiencies within its hiring, onboarding and credentialing processes and ease the burden placed on staff, HUC approached Credentially and results were quick to follow:‍

• ‍Average time to hire reduced to 6-8 days, with ongoing realisation of efficiencies anticipated to lead to further improvements.‍
• 11 hours per week saved on HR monitoring of ongoing compliance.
• Increase in the number of references received back
• Significant reduction in the number of emails and calls back and forth during the hiring process

The key to streamlining credentialing

The process of assessing the background and legitimacy of clinicians is, and rightly so, complex. There are many steps to checking qualifications, experience and competency, which when done manually can lead to mistakes and missed emails and documents. For HUC, through implementing credentialing software, they have been able to;

• Automate professional checks, including clinical registers, criminal records, and national body registrations.
• Digitise data, digitalise processes, automate evidence and tracking in real-time, improving the onboarding experience for candidates as well as administrators.
• Determine the status of over 230 clinicians in line with IR35 and submit to HMRC - all within two weeks.

Read the HUC Case Study to learn more about the savings HUC have made by implementing credentialing software.

About HUC

HUC is a Social Enterprise delivering integrated urgent healthcare services, including, Out of Hours, and NHS 111 services to approximately 3 million people across Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Bedfordshire.

Founded in 2007,one of the focus areas for HUC is to help reduce unnecessary hospital admissions and to provide care as close to people’s homes as possible. With 27 Primary Care Centres across three counties, HUC also undertake home visits for patients unable to access these centres.

For more information on HUC, visit https://hucweb.co.uk

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