Are Your Stakeholders Receiving Timely Provider Privileging Information?

Are Your Stakeholders Receiving Timely Provider Privileging Information?

Jul 20, 2018
  • Author:
    Vicki Searcy
    Title:
    Former VP, Consulting
    Company:
    VerityStream
    Vicki has managed several credentialing and privileging practices, led a national healthcare accreditation and compliance consulting practice, was a surveyor for the NCQA, and a former president of NAMSS.

Industry best practice is to make information about providers' granted privileges readily available to patient care providers (i.e., nursing stations, OR scheduling, pharmacy, etc.) in order to drive quality, patient safety, and informed decision making. In the past, paper copies of privileges for each provider were sent to these areas and as you might imagine, wind up being filed in big clunky binders and become outdated almost as quickly as they’re printed.


Fortunately today, credentialing software enables patient care providers to look up privileges electronically, which enables these various stakeholders to access the privileging information on-demand. To accompany this access, there should also be a policy that delineates how privileging information is accessed, when it should be accessed, and what a patient care provider should do if it is identified that a provider intends to exercise privileges that have not been granted. These efforts will assist in passing an accreditation survey with flying colors!


CredentialStream can eliminate the ineffective paper processes related to privileging information with embedded views designed to be accessed by any clinical stakeholder needing this timely information. These views can be configured with easy-to-use search capabilities (i.e. by physician or privilege) and the information displayed will include physician photos, staff status, and department, along with other critical demographic information.