Baton Health’s Mission to Make Credentialing Faster, Easier, and More Accurate Than Ever Before
Today, the process of credentialing medical providers is just too slow for the needs of our modern healthcare system — it’s very manual, error-ridden, and extremely costly. Credentialing requires dedicated people to scour hundreds of databases so they can process each one of the millions of credentialing events each year. Behind every health system are teams of people doing a massive job of manual data entry, copying and pasting, calling, faxing, and emailing to verify credentials before a physician can start seeing new patients. In a world of telehealth visits and EMR portability, credentialing teams are essentially still in the technological Stone Age.
Beyond just the antiquated processes, credentialing teams face daunting challenges with the data itself. Approximately 85% of credentialing applications have errors or missing data, and 30% of those errors are so critical that they require follow-up with the practitioner to confirm or update information. And this doesn’t even include situations where information has been purposefully omitted for which there are few effective solutions. The arduous process of manually verifying information and fixing these inaccuracies means that the credentialing process can take from two months to half a year- and every month that a provider is waiting can cost a practice up to $200,000 or more in lost revenue.
A new perspective
Today, even the most technologically savvy companies expedite credentialing by spending additional human capital. In primary source verification, in particular, the manual processes are so fragmented that true automation is just too costly. Earlier in my career I ran operations at two well-known credentialing and provider data management companies. We were able to compress an already industry-leading 15-day credentialing timeframe down to an average of 2.4 days while scaling the number of credentials we handled from a couple hundred per month to more than 15,000 per month.
I am proud of the work we did, but despite our best efforts we still relied on adding dozens upon dozens of people to manage scale. While people can be diligent and great at their jobs, using human beings for scale also increases the impact of downsides that come with manual effort — increased error rates and high costs.
Most credentialing teams do an amazing job of searching for and verifying information using the tools they have today, but they’re often overworked, burned out from manual data entry, and under increasing pressure with workforce turnover. These teams are doing the best they can with what they have, but the industry can do better.
Introducing Baton Health
The challenges I experienced helping to scale credentialing services inspired me to partner with Redesign Health in founding Baton Health. Our purpose, our solution, is very simple: We want to make the lives of the credentialing teams better while fundamentally changing how credentialing is performed.
Baton is a SaaS company building a Universal Primary Source for credentialing. One source with direct, near real-time access to complete, accurate, and compliant primary source information from hundreds of sources. With Baton, the old months-long process of manual primary source verification goes away. Within seconds of entering an NPI, teams have access to verify the credentials of every healthcare practitioner in the country, including license information that may have been left off the initial application.
Baton is the underlying data utility that practices, hospitals, health systems, payors, and software platforms can go to for unified search across all primary sources and for all PSV information.
Today, credentialing teams begin by individually verifying every piece of information reported to them, but cannot feasibly search states in which a license hasn’t been divulged. With a truly Universal Primary Source, Baton enables every credential to be verified from every primary source, every month.
Baton cuts overhead costs associated with primary source verification by 95%, and delivers results in seconds instead of months. With this plug-and-play addition to your workflow, medical executives and enterprise leaders can eliminate human errors in a single move. Medical Staff Professionals can turn their attention to the many, many more complex and critical tasks that require their skills.
As a single source of trusted information, the Universal Primary Source can also eliminate the need for practitioners to repetitively enter the same information into every application. This can save hours of paperwork for every single application. By creating individual records for each provider, we’re able to streamline things for practitioners when they move to a new state or switch specialties. We’ve seen practitioners with more than 50 distinct licenses, and keeping this information up to date is a data entry nightmare for everyone involved.
A new approach starts now
As a first step on this journey to deliver better tools to credentialing teams, Baton has launched the free National Credentialing Directory to centralize instant access to hundreds and hundreds of primary source verification databases that they would otherwise have to scour the web for. People can sign up for free today at directory.batonhealth.com.
Credentialing doesn’t have to be the costly bottleneck to quality healthcare delivery that it is today. I’ve had the privilege of speaking with practitioners of all stripes who are on the forefront of care delivery. There’s a unanimous agreement that their time is better spent caring for patients than filling out repetitive paperwork — and I’m sure patients waiting for care would agree. Our mission at Baton is to give that time back by creating a modern approach to tackle an important job faster and more accurately.
