Improving your onboarding process through effective communication

In any attempt to streamline the onboarding process, it is important to stress the importance of cross-department communication. Many organizations have developed a multi-departmental practitioner onboarding checklist and/or a multi-departmental onboarding meeting. If you are looking to improve your onboarding process, it is recommended you develop at least one of these tools.

“There should be a team that is always communicating where the practitioner is in the process. There should be ongoing communication between a variety of team members who have different roles but that need to know the status of the individual practitioner and how it impacts their specific area of responsibility or how they could help to communicate, coordinate, or collaborate with other areas of the workflow,” says Sally Pelletier, CPMSM, CPCS, advisory consultant and chief credentialing officer for The Greeley Company in Danvers, Massachusetts. “That is what the true onboarding experience should be: a very cohesive team-like experience where the physician feels like everyone is attending to their needs behind the scene.”

To develop a checklist, use your credentialing software. However, this checklist should not be exclusive to the credentialing-related steps of onboarding—it should be built out to include other departments. Niehaus says the checklist should contain as much information as needed from as many areas of the organization as possible. For example, what information still needs to be collected from the practitioner? Does recruitment have references that medical staff leaders can review? When is the practitioner’s planned start date? When will the credentials file be reviewed by the medical executive committee?

Source: News & Analysis