Overconfidence in credentialing processes can easily lead to $50k-$100k lost monthly billings per provider; Healthcare Workforce Management addresses the blind spots and prevents revenue leakage
Time is money, especially when it comes to recruiting and onboarding new providers in healthcare.
While most businesses can hire new staff and put them to work right away, that’s not true in healthcare. Healthcare employers need to ensure providers are properly credentialed before they can see patients.
Credentialing isn’t just about licenses to practice medicine. Those things are important and required, but so too is payer credentialing. Newly hired providers can’t even see patients until they are credentialed, let alone bill for providing those services.
Health insurance companies each have their own unique processes for credentialing – and it takes time. Many say too much time. However, this means healthcare facilities and rural hospitals must have their processes fine-tuned, or risk adding to the delays.
That’s where Healthcare Workforce Management can make a huge difference. It’s a provider recruiting platform especially designed for the challenges facing rural healthcare. Below are several revenue problems – as identified in a recent survey (n = 214) – that this product will help you solve.
1) Slash credentialing delays and prevent revenue leakage
The credentialing process easily takes two or three months, and often more. In this survey, some 94% of respondents indicated credentialing takes up to 90 days. While that seems to be an improvement over previous years, it’s still a lot of time for a provider to be on payroll, but be unable to bill insurers for the health services provided.
Industry benchmarks put the lost revenue per provider vacancy at between $7,000 and $9,000 per day. If credentialing takes just 30 days – which is quite fast comparatively – that provider’s employer is looking at lost billings in the range of $210,000 to $270,000 on an annual basis (per provider).
The associated revenue hit doubles in 60 days and triples in 90 days. About 5% of respondents indicated credentialing takes more than 90 days, which means the lost billings pile up. That puts a serious cash flow strain on healthcare companies – especially since many are struggling financially already.
Solution: Healthcare Workforce Management shrinks that time frame, accelerates the revenue cycle, and reduces financial leakage. It does this because it pulls in all the pertinent provider data in one place and provides streamlined workflows to smoothly complete credentialing.
2) End reliance on error-prone manual processes
The entire recruiting process in healthcare is still highly manual. That means recruiters and HR are very reliant on spreadsheets, email and paper, which is slow and error-prone. In this survey, 63% of respondents said between 20% and 100% of the recruiting and onboarding processes are conducted manually.
To put this into perspective – if you forget to send the right paper to the payer because the spreadsheet was outdated – suddenly your 30-day credentialing window grows to 60, 90 or even more.
Solution: Eliminate and reduce the errors caused by managing credentialing on spreadsheets and paper. That’s where mistakes and delays turn up – and where auditors find vulnerabilities. Our platform automates the steps your staff currently perform manually.
The value proposition is simple: automation = risk reduction + time savings.
3) Resolve the ‘credentialing confidence paradox’ that leads to lost billings
Most respondents (60%) were “completely confident” that the providers their organization had on staff had up-to-date credentials. That sounded fantastic until we compared these answers with the answer to lost billings.
Of those who were “completely confident” (n = 130), nearly one-third (32%) reported lost monthly billings of $50,000. Further, nearly one in five (18%) said they have losses to the tune of $100,000 per month or more. Another 12% weren’t sure, which suggests a critical blind spot.
Over a year, that can add up to a $600,000 in lost billings at the low end – and reach $1 million in lost billings at the high end. That’s a lot of lost revenue given the expressed confidence.
The survey also showed these numbers moved in tandem: the less confident a respondent was in their credentialing process, the higher the lost billings reported. For example, of those who said they were “fairly confident,” 61% said they sustained monthly losses of $50,000, and 30% said $100,000 or more.
Correlation is not causation, yet onboarding and credentialing delays are an operational source of lost billings. It’s concerning that even those who feel confident about their process paradoxically reported significant financial losses.
Solution: Our platform resolves this paradox by giving every stakeholder – finance, HR, compliance, operations – a real-time view of provider credentialing. The result is faster onboarding, fewer denials, stronger compliance, and, potentially, hundreds of thousands of dollars in recovered revenue per provider.
4) Prevent reimbursement delays from credentialing gaps
A little more than one-third of respondents (34%) say they experience reimbursement delays or payer issues related to credentialing gaps “sometimes,” “often,” or “always.” Another 39% indicated delays “rarely” happen, but based on the lost billings, even those rare events take a sizable bite out of revenue.
Some respondents feel the payers are responsible for these hold-ups, as expressed in open-ended responses. Indeed, this is just one of many issues with payers that are in need of improvement. Yet at the operational level, which is what healthcare facilities can control, it’s incumbent to ensure your processes prevent that from happening even once.
Solution: Build systems and processes that verify credentials are current. Even those who are confident in their data admit errors can and do lead to lost billings. The results of this survey show that preventing even a single denied claim can avert losses of $50,000–$150,000 per provider for the typical facility.
5) Gain full visibility, automation, and compliance tracking
The final question of the survey was open-ended. It asked what respondents would change about credentialing and onboarding. Several themes emerged around visibility, workflow, tracking and automation. This mirrors what we hear from rural healthcare facilities and hospitals on a consistent basis, day-to-day.
Solution: This is exactly what our platform is designed to solve. Better still, finance and the CFO will never have to exchange emails to understand exactly what’s happening. They can have access and see the data and trends for themselves.
The system is modern, having launched in November of 2023. This past year, we added credentialing data to the platform from the preeminent data provider. Recruiters can see any potential pitfalls before they make an offer to a provider, streamline completion in onboarding, and maintain complete visibility during employment.
More than a good business practice, in 2025, the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) introduced standards that require monthly monitoring of credentialing data. Older platforms that struggle to meet this compliance requirement have a 30-day extension. You can replace those old systems with ours for about the cost of a single provider search.
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See the software for yourself! Healthcare Workforce Management is designed specifically for rural healthcare recruiting: Contact us for a no-obligation demo.
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Image credit: Gemini
