While we never intended to build recruiting software for rural healthcare, the power of observation led us to build a crucial solution for an underserved market
by Intelliworx
There’s an old saying that one problem tends to lead to another. Yet for an observant technologist, sometimes the most unlikely problems in business are synonymous with opportunity.
Such was the case with our Healthcare Workforce Management solution. It’s a software product designed to help rural healthcare facilities reduce the time and expense of recruiting providers. The twist in the story is that we didn’t set out with the intention of building this product; rather, we discovered the opportunity in the course of delivering a completely different product.
Digitizing forms is just the start of a business process
Intelliworx got started more than 20 years ago with the simple idea of helping government agencies modernize their reported 23,000 different forms. Yet digitizing forms wasn’t enough because a form is merely a means of collecting data to inform decision-making. In other words, data collection is just the beginning of a larger process.
That led us to build a suite of tools to convert complicated government forms into simple computer-based interviews – what we call intelligent interviews. Then, on the back end, we securely store the data for review, approval and analysis.
Bi-directional integration is available too. This means the collected data can be used by another system, another business process or even another form. As a FedRAMP-authorized solution provider, we hold nearly 33 of the 437 total authorizations to operate (ATO) across the federal government (we have 39 and are working to get this updated).
Enter the Healthcare Professional Scholarship Program
One of the more dominant use cases of our application management solution for the federal government is managing paperwork digitally – scholarships, benefits or even building permits. Importantly, this is done at very high scales given the volume of U.S. citizens and businesses who apply for various government services or approvals every day.
The Healthcare Professional Scholarship Program (HPSP), which is championed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), is a prime example. The HPSP is an amazing program designed to help fill critical vacancies in the VA’s healthcare system.
Such vacancies include doctors, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, psychologists and other medical specialists. If sucessful, applicants receive 100% of the tuition and required fees. They also receive a monthly stipend.
In return, graduates incur a minimum two-year service obligation at a location where the VA needs those skills the most. Many of those positions are located in rural America. That’s a pretty good deal – candidates get school paid for and effectively have a job post-graduation that’s all but guaranteed.
Managing 15,000 scholarship applications
Intelliworx provides the interface for scholarship applicants to submit an application easily using our time-saving intelligent interview feature. The technology organizes the data for validation, routes it through a VA-defined review and approval process and finally, provides metrics and automated reporting.
The paperwork is pretty detailed. Applicants have to pull together forms, transcripts, essays, and letters of recommendation, among other items. Reviews and approvals have a multi-step process, often allowing for some back and forth. The Intelliworx solution facilitates the paper gathering and approval routing while enabling collaboration during the back and forth exchanges.
Over the last five years, Intelliworx has facilitated more than 15,000 scholarship applications, while also supporting the security and interoperability that advance the agency’s modernization objectives. The efficiency of the overall platform has led to additional work in other areas of government, such as financial disclosure, which have the same fundamental needs.
The challenge of credentialing providers
In the course of business, one of the challenges we’d heard the VA wrestling with, but had little to do with managing the scholarship applications, was credentialing providers. Healthcare professionals are required to have credentials to practice, and their employer must have a process for verifying them.
Those credentials must be rigorously maintained, require continuing education, and pristine record-keeping. This adds another tricky step to the process of onboarding a new provider. That’s true for newly minted providers fresh out of school but also existing providers, who might change employers or the geography in which they practice.
Verifying credentials can easily take one to three months; however, six months or more isn’t uncommon. Add to that the fact that providers may have several credentials to maintain, and are always busy taking care of patients and it’s easy to see how they can forget about it and their credentials lapse. Suddenly, the provider isn’t allowed to provide care until they get current again.
We realized quickly that, as a business process, collecting data and reviewing credentials isn’t substantively different from applying for a scholarship. Both are exactly the type of data-driven process our platform was designed to automate! So, we started digging into the topic by interviewing subject matter experts (SMEs) and reviewing findings from healthcare industry surveys.
Building a recruiting platform to attract providers
In the course of researching this business problem, we quickly learned credentialing was just one part of a bigger human resources (HR) problem. For many organizations, recruiting providers was a reactive process, expensive, and, at times, disorganized.
This made a vexing problem all the more challenging. Surveys show 45% of healthcare providers will refuse a job offer if the recruiting experience is unpolished. Given the prolonged talent shortage and the fact that providers are reluctant to work in rural areas, these facilities were eliminating about half of the talent pool before they even got started recruiting a backfill.
Based on what we learned, we set out to build a cost-effective software tool purposely designed to solve this problem for rural healthcare. It helps them get a handle on positions open and filled, forecast talent needs, provide a better engagement experience for candidates, and streamline onboarding.
Adding in provider credentialing
Finally, we’ve also just added a credentialing feature to the software. We’ve partnered with a trusted data provider to integrate data from nearly every category of provider data available, including doctors, physician assistants (PAs), nurse practitioners (NPs), and nurses.
This streamlines the recruiting process, prevents avoidable issues – such as making a job offer to a sanctioned candidate – and generally allows rural facilities to get on with the business of taking care of patients.
While we hadn’t set out with the initial goal of building software tailored to the rural healthcare market, we uncovered a critical need in this underserved market. This anecdote speaks to the power of observation, which isn’t a power limited to technologists but is available to any problem solver, including healthcare providers.
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See the software for yourself! Healthcare Workforce Management is designed with rural healthcare recruiting in mind because in our assessment, rural areas have the greatest need. Contact us for a no-obligation demo.
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