Why is Credentialing Important for Your Health-Tech Startup?
Credentialing is a vital process for health-tech startups that connect patients and providers. Credentialing lays the foundation for how you conduct business and treat your health care professionals. If you don’t set this process up correctly in the earliest stages of building your company, credentialing will create drag as you accelerate into the growth stage. Implementing a credentialing protocol early allows high-growth startups to achieve efficiency and avoid working backwards later to put a credentialing system into place. Credentialing helps you:
Provide Quality Care
This should be the number concern of all health-tech starts. We are here because we want to improve the final outcome of the healthcare system–the care that is provided to patients. Credentialing is a crucial step in providing quality care because it determines who is providing the care and how efficiently your organization is running.
Understand and Manage Risk
Some providers are higher risk than others. As a platform provider that connects patients with doctors, it’s your job to be aware of the risks and manage them appropriately. Yet you don’t want to treat doctors like they are guilty until proven innocent, nor do you want to make arbitrary judgement calls about which doctors should have access to your platform.
As you scale up your organization, having a credentialing process in place will make it easier on you and your doctors. Credentialing provides a wealth of data. If you have the ability to analyze the data generated by credentialing you will be able to understand and manage the risk your startup. It will allow you to make evidence-based decisions about which doctors you want to work with and which doctors are too risky.
Know the People you Hire
The first doctor you hire to work on your new platform might be someone you know personally, perhaps she’s your co-founder. You don’t see much risk in getting her up and running without any due process. Now think about the 10th doctor, and the 25th, and the 100th doctor. Do you know them all personally? Doubtful. Do you want to be sure you understand if you’re putting patients at unnecessary risk by hiring a particular doctor? Definitely.
Source: New feed
