Five Rivers streamlines credential monitoring and compliance.

Five Rivers Health Centers is federally funded, which means that it must demonstrate to the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) that every healthcare professional who sees patients at its sites is appropriately credentialed and privileged. Tracking the credentials and licensures of every doctor, midlevel provider, nurse, clinical staff member, and third-party provider who works at a Five Rivers site—from professional licenses and Drug Enforcement Administration certificates to life-support training, medical school attended, and residencies completed—is critical to maintaining its funding status.

Maintaining a library of credentials.

Keeping all the necessary credentials data up-to-date became time-consuming as the organization grew, and the Five Rivers team knew a shift from physical to digital documentation was needed.

The team explored a specialized medical credential tracking system, but it quickly became apparent that it would take too much manual work to maintain. “You had to jump through hoops to get any of the information that you needed,” said the Five Rivers’ Chief Medical Officer (CMO). “It was almost like you were duplicating a lot of your processes to fit into what they had. We really struggled with the credentialing process and keeping it all sorted for at least three years prior to switching over to Evisort (now Workday).”

An innovative credential tracking solution.

To fulfill its credential tracking needs, the Five Rivers team turned to AI, which was already assisting with the rest of its contracts. The Five Rivers team easily uploaded the credentials it needed to track into Workday. “Prior to using Evisort (now Workday), I had to upload all the pages individually,” said an executive assistant with Five Rivers. “Now, I can upload 10 documents at one time. That was my ‘aha’ moment with the platform because I knew it was going to save me so much time.” After uploading the documents, the team members could organize the files in a way that works best for them and didn’t have to reconfigure the files to work with a rigid, predetermined system.

“Everyone we track has a digital folder with all their documents in it,” said the CMO. “If Evisort (now Workday) tells us a document is about to expire, we’ll just upload the new document, and the old one moves to that folder. So, it has really simplified the process and ensures we’re not missing anything.”

This credential tracking capability has also helped Five Rivers comply with the Federal Tort Claims Act. In the event of a malpractice lawsuit, the organization must show credentials for the person named in the suit. If necessary, the team can now quickly demonstrate that it took the necessary steps to verify the credentials of the Five Rivers employees and affiliates.

Keeping the organization compliant.

Before using it to manage credentials, Five Rivers used Workday’s platform to help it remain compliant with HRSA, which conducts a site visit every three years to assess the organization’s administrative, clinical, and financial operations and the contracts that support these areas. Five Rivers’ contracts were previously stored either as physical files or as PDF files on hard drives, which made tracking contract language and expiration dates difficult.

“When we have HRSA site visits, the reviewers look at all of our contracts to see if they’re in compliance,” said the Five Rivers Chief Financial Officer (CFO). “Before we used Evisort (now Workday), our contracts were housed in a room filled with filing cabinets, and we had to rely on historical knowledge to know if a contract had expired.” 

Using the platform, the Five Rivers team has been able to quickly upload, digitize, and centralize contracts, and can efficiently search for specific, required language across contracts and update or add information. “A couple of months ago, we were talking about a contract we had with an organization and we were wondering, ‘Do we have that clause in there or not?’” the CMO added. “And our CFO said, ‘I’ll just use Evisort (now Workday) . . . and yes, we do!’”

Streamlining site visit preparation from 1 week to 1 day.

Preparing for HRSA site visits is now much more efficient using AI. Before implementing the platform, it took a week to make sure the Five Rivers team had compiled all the documents required for a site visit. With a centralized contract repository, standardized naming conventions, and the speed of AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM), that process now only takes 1 day. “We’re under a very strict time crunch when we get ready for a site visit, plus we have to keep up with our daily work,” said the Five Rivers CFO. “Using Evisort (now Workday), we get back those extra days we would’ve used preparing for the site visit. It definitely puts us in a better position to be successful.”

“Evisort (now Workday) has made my job so much easier,” adds the Five Rivers executive assistant. “It’s less stressful. I can just go through and pull documents. It’s easier because I don’t have to wonder, ‘What did I name it? Where can I find it?’ You can just type in a word and it pulls up just what you need. Everything is right at your fingertips. It’s great.”