When a healthcare organization automates a process, it can free up workers to focus on clinically relevant tasks. That’s a big deal in an industry that needs more staff.
Healthcare background checks can help mitigate the risk of medical malpractice lawsuits by verifying credentials and preventing negligent hiring. However, the benefits of automated healthcare background checks continue beyond there.
Reduced Risk of Fraud
Healthcare is an industry that requires a high level of trust. While hospitals want to weed out candidates that may threaten patients, like those with violent or sex crimes, they also need to ensure their new hires won’t steal from the hospital. Criminal history screenings for healthcare professionals should include searches for embezzlement, fraud, theft, and other financially-related crimes.
Many states have laws that limit the amount of time information can be reported on, and this can impact how long a healthcare background check takes to complete. However, other data types are accessible more quickly, such as motor vehicle records, education verification, and credential checks. An experienced and comprehensive screening provider should be able to work around these restrictions and still provide accurate, up-to-date results.
In addition to standard criminal and civil record checks, hospitals should run a national sex offender search. This identifies people who have been criminally charged with, convicted of, or pleaded guilty to a sex crime, which is critical for medical workers who have regular contact with children and vulnerable adults. Healthcare facilities should also conduct a Federal Exclusion Search to identify employees prohibited from receiving federal funds, such as Medicare or Medicaid. This search also includes sanctions information identifying healthcare professionals sanctioned by state licensing or certification boards for ethical violations, vicarious liability, and corporate negligence.
Increased Efficiency
You may not realize it, but much time in healthcare is spent on manual processes. Often, these workflows are not designed to be automated but can benefit from automation when the right solution presents itself.
A well-designed application can take a process that takes hours or days to complete and reduce it to minutes. That’s a massive improvement in turnaround times without sacrificing quality. That improved turnaround is a major competitive advantage for CRAs acquiring clients in the current labor market.
Healthcare background checks are a critical part of the hiring process. Using a background verification service helps prevent medical practitioners with questionable motives from being hired, putting patients at risk. Predators use their access to confidential patient records and information to steal money, personal data, or even identities. An effective background check can identify the presence of these criminal or disciplinary issues and prevent them from being hired.
The best healthcare background check software will also make it easy to audit its work. It should record, and store timestamped screenshots of each page it visits during its research. This way, if any quality issues result in inaccurate or incomplete data being passed along to the customer, you will have proof of exactly what was found and how long it took for the system to find it.
Reduced Time to Hire
As the healthcare industry faces a critical clinical staff shortage (and projected long-term shortages) and high patient demand, it is important to eliminate as many non-clinical tasks from the hiring process as possible. Automating background checks reduces turnaround time, improves the candidate experience, and allows your team to focus on more meaningful work.
Integrated screening solutions, such as our Apploi platform, provide a single interface for clients and candidates that automates many tasks and streamlines processes. In this case, a large primary care network used to manually manage a high volume of background checks with varying timelines, resulting in a poor candidate experience and a bottleneck for their internal teams.
While reducing the time to hire should be a priority for any organization, it’s especially essential for the healthcare industry, where making risky hiring decisions can impact patients’ lives. Luckily, automation is often the best solution for helping you hire faster without sacrificing quality. However, it’s important to note that true automation does not reduce the number of human researchers in your department; instead, it allows them to focus more on high-value tasks like interviewing and evaluating candidates.
Reduced Costs
Like many other industries, bad hires cost more than money in healthcare. A bad background check can be life-threatening in an environment where employees are responsible for patient safety and care. The right background screening partner will help you ensure that your hiring standards are upheld and that you do everything possible to protect your patients, medical teams, and brand from costly mistakes.
According to a recent study by CAQH, the healthcare industry could save up to $25 billion by automating its manual transactions. While the industry is making progress, it’s important to prioritize tasks that will have the biggest impact on ROI. That means ensuring that all employee-related transactions are automated, including background checks.
While running a comprehensive background check on every applicant is crucial, you may also want to run more specific searches. For example, it’s helpful to contact previous employers to verify education and employment histories in healthcare. This can help identify issues that may not show up on a criminal record search but are still important for your facility to know.
It’s also good to run national sex offender searches and identity verification checks. This helps to ensure that you’re only looking at records for the correct person, not someone with a similar name who may have committed other crimes.
