Everyone wants to be sure their physician is competent and appropriately trained. The way this is done is through credentialing. A new applicant for privileges to practice at a hospital or other health care facility fills out an application and submits a curriculum vitae that details when and where a physician trained and the certifications obtained, such as specialty boards, and a work history (if any).
Copies of key documents — medical degrees, residency certificates, and the like — accompany the application. The applicant also provides the names of professional references who can attest to competency. Also required are declarations that the applicant has never been fired (or asked to resign) from a medical job for competency issues. The applicant also must also swear to a long list of other things. These include not being a drug addict (who would answer yes to that?), a convicted felon, or to have been disciplined for questionable or illegal activity. A committee then reviews the application and grants (or not) privileges to practice medicine at that facility.
Before the committee grants privileges, however, all the information gets verified. This makes perfect sense because, regrettably, there are more than a few documented instances of people embellishing or even outright lying on their applications. I have been on enough selection committees to know that folks occasionally stretch the truth. Flagrant examples of this occasionally make the news. The job of credentialing departments is to check up on all this. Interestingly, in the example I just linked to, the guy hoodwinked all the verifiers; it was only picked up later by accident.
It gets more complicated because not just hospitals and health care facilities want their practitioners credentialed. All of the people who pay the bills, such as insurance companies and the government — Medicare, Medicaid — want to make sure they are paying legitimate costs to legitimate practitioners. So they have their own credentialing departments, all different in how they do things. A typical physician has to be credentialed by every single one of the payers covering every single one of his or her patients. That can mean a dozen payers or more. So, for example, besides having privileges at the hospitals at which I practice, my background is verified by all the people who pay the bills for my patients. And believe me, the requirements of all these entities are not the same and all have their own sheaf of forms to fill out and supporting documents to submit.
This situation cries out for a central clearing house for credentialing information. Some examples of this exist, such as this one, if nothing else because collecting all this information is tedious and expensive. Credentialing departments at many facilities are getting larger all the time. Credentialing is also a major industry, with overwhelmed facility credentialing staffs farming out the process to outside contractors. The problem is that, in our disorganized health care “system,” no facility or entity wants to surrender the right to collect their own data in their own way. Attempts to institute a more global process, at least in my experience, have simply added another layer of bureaucracy to slog through. The convenience, or even the sanity, of the physicians wrestling with this unholy mess is not their concern. For physicians like me, who practice at several hospitals in different parts of the country with little overlap in who the regional payers are, the expense and hassle of it all are large. And even when you think you’re done, you’re not: many entities require frequent updates, often meaning a whole new application. One that I deal with demands this every three months.
OK — rant over. But what prompted this was my agreeing recently to help out some people for a few weeks at a new hospital. I’m now four months into the credentialing “process.” During that time I’ve dealt with three separate organizations, none of which communicate with each other. I’ve worn out my fax machine submitting extraneous document after document. Nearly every day my email inbox has strident demands for still something else immediately! If I hadn’t promised my time to people I like, I think at this point I would just say: no, I’m done — good luck.
I’ve been practicing medicine for over 35 years. For my first job, I just showed up for work. People checked that I had graduated from medical school, done a residency, and passed my exams, but that was about it. I realize physicians have to some extent brought all this on ourselves by a few of us scamming the system over the years or just lying. I recall a case some years ago of a physician lying about a five-year gap in his work history, a gap that turned out to be because he was serving time in prison for third-degree murder. (I looked for a link to this incident but couldn’t find one — it most likely was pre-Google.)
Anyway, I think this credentialing mess has got to get better organized somehow. We need a central authority of some sort, accepted by all. The current trajectory is unsustainable. Health care is expensive enough, and all this adds many millions to the total costs for little benefit.
Christopher Johnson is a pediatric intensive care physician and author of Keeping Your Kids Out of the Emergency Room: A Guide to Childhood Injuries and Illnesses, Your Critically Ill Child: Life and Death Choices Parents Must Face, How to Talk to Your Child’s Doctor: A Handbook for Parents, and How Your Child Heals: An Inside Look At Common Childhood Ailments. He blogs at his self-titled site, Christopher Johnson, MD.
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