TPQVO Celebrates 10 Years

July 1, 2008 marks TPQVO's 10-year anniversary of providing credentials verification and application services. Back in 1998, the healthcare credentialing landscape looked much different from today:

The American Medical Association's American Medical Assessment Program (AMAP) was in full development swing and proposed to offer physicians a way to control their own credentialing portfolio.

Today, AMAP is gone, replaced in part by medical specialty boards emphasis on "maintenance of certification." Some specialty boards like the American Board of Obstetrics & Gynecology now require recertification on an annual basis!

Many surgery centers were using a physician's affiliations with a local hospital as a proxy for performing their own credentialing process. Most surgeries were performed in hospitals.

In the past decade, the trend toward more outpatient surgery continues. For the past five or so years, surgery centers and physician offices performing surgery must be accredited as part of state licensing and perform independent credentials verification processes as part of accreditation/licensing.

The National Practitioner Data Bank queries were performed using a modem and DOS-based software called QPRAC. The NPDB reports were then mailed to the requestor.

Today, NPDB queries can only be performed through the IQRS using highly secured and encrypted Internet communication methods.

Getting a state license verification meant mailing a letter of request or using roster that was published periodically.

These days, most state licensing boards will only provide verifications through web site portals. Many state licensing boards require an annual subscription and successful registration to obtain official verifications.

License and other non-static credentials were verified periodically during the recredentialing process. Hospitals relied on the medical staff member to notify them of any problem with licensing, liability or about any loss of insurance coverage.

Since 2005, hospitals must monitor expiration dates and obtain verifications on an ongoing basis.

Identity theft was unheard of and most credit card theft was done by finding credit card receipts. There was little reason to be concerned about using your social security number for identification purposes. No one had heard about any cases of physician imposters.

Today, even the public has heard about dangerous imposters like Michael Swango who manage to get appointed to hospital staffs and pose a real threat to patient health. The reason for performing primary source verification checks was to comply with JCAHO (now called "Joint Commission") standards. "Negligent credentialing" was rarely discussed or understood.

Now, healthcare organizations are more vigilant and take credentials verification more seriously as an important part of risk management. As a result of these trends, credentials verification is more demanding than ever.

• Higher technological investment in hardware and software
• Continuous training in the various accrediting organizations' credentialing standards
• Greater attention to processes, including keeping current Policies & Procedures

TPQVO has keep current with these trends by making the educational and infrastructure investment required to meet or exceed credentials verification demands. It makes more sense then ever to outsource credentials verification to TPQVO.