Becker’s Hospital Review recently spoke with Brad Bach, a Principal in KPMG’s Healthcare practice, about challenges that providers face in onboarding healthcare professionals and KPMG’s solutions to help providers automate and expedite the onboarding process.
Mr. Bach explained that the journey of onboarding a physician or a nurse is often a long one, challenged by the complexities of credentialing, privileging and enrollment tasks. “In many organizations,” said Mr. Bach, “the process is still administered using paper forms, faxes and back-and-forth emails.” These manual processes are slow and time consuming and are clearly a candidate for automation.
KPMG has focused on understanding what the ideal onboarding journey should look like
Having carefully studied providers’ onboarding process for healthcare professionals, KPMG has developed an understanding of what good looks like. “In an ideal onboarding journey,” Mr. Bach said, “credentialing and privileging occur in a streamlined, linear process, while enrollment begins after receipt of signatures. The process should be completed prior to the employment start date to avoid delays in seeing patients and billing for services.”
KPMG’s onboarding solution streamlines and automates the activities
Based on understanding providers’ unmet needs when bringing aboard new healthcare professionals, KPMG has developed KPMG Provider Onboarding and Credentialing. This offering, along with the capabilities of ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery module, enables providers to develop efficient, transparent and secure onboarding solutions.
Providers can create a single point of entry to engage new healthcare professionals who join an organization. Simple, user-friendly visuals guide these new employees through all necessary tasks in the onboarding and credentialing process. For example, as part of the credentialing process, a newly hired physician might be required to upload a copy of their board license. This can be done simply by attaching and uploading the file. Because this solution uses workflow automation, behind the scenes, the uploaded license is automatically routed to an HR onboarding specialist, who can review and verify the license. A task that was previously done manually — and which could take considerable time — can now be handled easily, quickly and digitally. Other onboarding tasks can be handled and verified similarly.
Also, as part of the onboarding process, workflow can be created and automated to engage the right people in the organization with the right messaging at the right time. For example, whenever a new physician begins their onboarding journey, the organization’s marketing team can automatically be notified and assigned the task of creating a bio for the physician on the company portal.
These two examples highlight how the many tasks that comprise the onboarding process can be streamlined and automated. For new hires, everything can be done from a desktop dashboard or a mobile phone app.
Benefits of KPMG’s offering include speed, efficiency and revenue optimization
KPMG’s implementation approach enables provider organizations to use preconfigured processes, reducing the development time for automating onboarding by as much as 30 percent.
Once developed and implemented, the KPMG Provider Onboarding and Credentialing offering decreases the time needed by healthcare professionals to complete the onboarding journey. As a result of modernizing the provider onboarding experience, newly hired healthcare professionals can be in the clinic faster, treating patients and allowing the organization to bill for their services. Mr. Bach stated, “Our approach can significantly decrease the time needed to complete the onboarding journey, delivering a better experience for providers and enabling them to begin treating patients and billing sooner, which will ultimately increase the speed to revenue.”
In addition, KPMG’s solution provides increased visibility throughout the entire onboarding process. Analytics measure each step in the onboarding process, identify bottlenecks and can be used to improve the process. Analytics include measuring the timing of each step, new hire satisfaction and employee turnover.
In launching the KPMG Provider Onboarding and Credentialing offering, KPMG has taken an important step to help healthcare providers make the ideal onboarding journey a reality.
