Hayes Locums is celebrating Medical Services Professionals Week from November 7-13, 2021. MSPs are the gatekeepers of patient safety for healthcare facilities, ensuring providers meet credentialing and licensing requirements. Our teams at Hayes Locums do the footwork to ensure our providers meet these standards.

How does this process work? We spoke to David Richardson, senior vice president of customer experience, about the important jobs performed by Hayes Locums’ licensing and credentialing teams. Hayes Locums medical staff services are split into internal credentialing, quality assurance, external credentialing, and licensing teams.

Medical Services Professionals at Hayes

Internal Credentialing

The internal credentialing team is responsible for credentialing a provider through Hayes Locums credentialing protocols and requirements. This initial screening reviews the providers credentials line up with their experience and secures them for coverage under Hayes’ A-rated malpractice coverage.*

Quality Assurance

After the internal credentialing process, the QA and risk management team performs the final review of a provider’s application. “QA gives the stamp of approval that they meet the Hayes Locums credentialing requirements,” says David.

External Credentialing

External credentialing supports hospitals and their privileging process. “A provider gets confirmed, goes through Hayes’ internal credentialing, and then has to go through the hospital privileging process in order to walk through doors and care for patients,” says David. The Hayes Locums team helps facilitate this by pre-populating applications and collecting supporting documents so providers don’t have to do the heavy lifting. “We try to lift that burden for providers, and, as a result, the hospitals’ medical staff offices have an easier time with processing.”

Licensing

The licensing team works with providers every step of the way towards acquiring their state licenses, pre-filling as much of their application as possible. They help compile all required documents and send them to the licensing board on the provider’s behalf. “We’re experts in the licensing space, so we know the requirements each state has in place in order to process a license,” says David. “We can help a provider manage that process more efficiently.”

The Hayes Locums Difference

Hayes Locums differs from some locum tenens agencies by providing a single point of contact from the external credentialing team to medical staff offices at facilities. “We have one external credentialing rep that coordinates with the medical staff office,” says David. “This gives us the ability to really know the credentialing process of a hospital.”

The licensing and credentialing teams at Hayes Locums prioritize streamlining the process as much as possible for both providers and medical staff offices. By being experts in what a licensing board needs, and the timeframe in which paperwork needs to be submitted to accomplish a particular start date, our teams ensure rapid coverage by quality providers while minimizing the burden on both providers and facilities.

This was a particularly important quality during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when emergency licenses were in high demand. “You don’t have a pandemic blueprint,” says David. “It was being a genuine partner with facilities and MSOs, and creating trust, that helped us deliver faster results and get locum tenens support where it was needed.”

How Hayes Helps Healthcare

David tries to regularly remind his teams of the importance of their work. “We so often get disconnected from the end result of making a placement that has an impact in an individual’s life and in a community,” says David. “We’re creating opportunities for life-saving effort to be accomplished by physicians and advanced practice providers. That is our inspiration and motivation for what we do every day.”

“Our core values aren’t just words on a website or on the walls of our building, but operating principles by which we try to make decisions,” he says. “We want to put our customers’ needs first. We mean it—it’s not just in a catchy phrase. We try to operate within that kind of mindset, from top all the way down.”

Hayes Locums offers thanks to the medical services professionals on our team and throughout the country who ensure patients receive needed care from qualified providers. Happy Medical Services Professionals Week!

*Any malpractice insurance provided by Hayes Locums is subject to the terms, conditions and exclusions of the operative policy.