Assignment:
The Credentialing Function
Credentialing of clinicians is a specific area that requires integration of quality improvement with risk management functions.
Credentialing is an official process that all health care organizations must complete. The National Practitioner Data Base (NPDB) is a specific source that organizations should use for assuring that licensed providers have no records of fraud, lawsuits, et cetera. In addition, state licensing boards must also be consulted to ensure that the clinician indeed has a license and may be employed by your organization.
You are the risk manager in charge of credentialing of a large, teaching hospital. All health care providers must be credentialed prior to working with patients. Consider one of the following:
- foreign-trained medical students.
- on-call registered nursing from a staffing agency.
- a physician with three pending lawsuits from patients injured by the physician.
What type of credentialing needs to be considered for your choice? What databases should be checked? What type of background should be collected? Create a 250 to 300 word response.
Guidelines:
You are the staffing coordinator for the large, teaching hospital. Staffing is very tight. You need every available body to work. The medical students are needed for help with care on the nursing floors as well as in the ER. The urgent care is staffed by several medical students, too. Nursing staff is so short that you have relied on on-call and staffing agencies for at least 10% of each shift for the last month. You have had complaints that several of the nurses seemed to have difficulty understanding English and two have been caught smoking in a medication room. The physician is badly needed in orthopedic. Patients with fractures have had to wait upwards of 24 hours to have surgeries.
As the staffing coordinator, what response do you have to the Risk Manager in credentialing? Will you wait to make sure that credentialing is complete? Will you look at ways to circumvent the system? What additional perspectives do you have? Compare and contrast your own thoughts on this post with those provided by a colleague.