Credentialing Software Is Essential To The Aged Care Industry, Here’s Why
Verifying the credentials of medical personnel who have direct contact with patients is essential. In fact, healthcare organisations need to ensure that everyone directly or indirectly involved in patient care has the proper accreditation and licensing to legally perform their job.
Credentialing software streamlines the verification process by accessing relevant data directly so that organisations can see it all in one place rather than verifying each accreditation and license independently.
Credentialing Software in the Aged Care System
A focus on the regulation of the aged care industry makes it very important to verify each employee’s credentials. Credentialing software and a visitor management system for aged care can ensure that each new employee has the proper accreditations to perform the job for which they were hired.
Having this tool at their disposal is essential for aged care facility administrators for more than one reason.
Compliance
The most obvious reason to use this software is that it helps facilities ensure that all their employees comply with the regulations for care providers in aged care centres.
If a facility is not in compliance, it can face fines and other penalties and will undoubtedly draw closer scrutiny from authorities in the future.
Quality software will help you avoid lapses in licensure. For example, perhaps a nurse or medical attendant is working with an expired credential but are unaware of this lapse. An employer with good credentialing software will get an early warning of the upcoming deadline and remind the employee to start the renewal process.
Even in instances where credential expiration happened by mistake, the facility and worker are still at fault and will be subject to penalties.
Workflow
An aged care facility has many different providers or contractors, some of whom occasionally provide treatment or other medical services to residents. Credentialing software with features such as facial recognition can make identity verification easy. In a fully staffed facility, manually doing such credential and ID verification would be a full-time job for at least one person. With his automated software, these employees have time to perform other vital tasks.
Also, workers and contractors will be able to enter the facility more quickly without having to wait for a receptionist to verify their identity and accreditations manually. Most employees and contractors will appreciate the quicker check-in process provided by advanced credentialing software.
Risk Management and Liability
Liability is a significant issue for aged care facilities. If someone with lapsed credentials causes issues or harms a patient because they are unqualified, the facility is liable. In addition to penalties from authorities, they could have to deal with lawsuits from the patient and be hit with an increased cost for insurance coverage.
Credentialing software can lower the risk of such a disaster by ensuring that everyone working inside the facility is qualified.
Lower Insurance Costs
Insurance companies who provide coverage for aged care facilities base the price of their service on risk. With state-of-the-art credentialing software in place, the insurer assumes less risk because they know unqualified providers will not be able to serve residents. A facility can notify their insurer when they upgrade their software system. Often, the insurance provider will recognise the lower level of risk provided by this system, and they will decrease the cost of coverage in response to this change.
Is Your Aged Care Facility Using the Best Software?
There are multiple advantages to having quality credentialing based software and a digital visitor management system in an aged care facility. While it is important to handle compliance and liability issues, it also ensures that residents are protected and get quality care from qualified providers.
If your facility does not have this kind of software or uses software that does not take advantage of the latest technology, such as facial recognition, it may be time to seek a new, better product.