Background Check: Automating Medical Credentialing At A Major Medical Center

The university medical center is made up of five hospitals, a college of medicine and public health, two research institutes, and a network of more than 30 medical facilities throughout its home state. Its largest hospital contains approximately 1,000 beds. The medical center's three main hospitals alone total more than 2,000 doctors and residents. The medical credentialing department at the medical center is responsible for verifying the records and checking the backgrounds of every one of those doctors. That department is also charged with maintaining medical school alumni records and the credentialing documents and official files of all the doctors previously employed at one of the three hospitals. Considering that public health is one of the most important concerns in our society, these records are very extensive and can be quite a lot to manage properly.

The systems administrator for corporate credentialing at the medical center is part of the team accountable for the proper maintenance of doctors' records and the credentialing process. In the summer of 2004, she began looking for an imaging system that would enable her department to manage their multitude of doctors' records electronically. Her initial search was for an electronic document management system (EDMS) that could integrate with their existing software applications and eliminate a lot of their hard-copy files. After preliminary discussions with a locally based EDMS provider, she began working with another department within the university that had experience with EDMS and Optical Image Technology, Inc.'s DocFinity® software suite. Together, they discovered that DocFinity could assist the medical center's credentialing department in ways far beyond imaging.