Introducing Workforce Validate

This blog was taken from a recent HealthStream webinar entitled “Introducing Workforce Validate.” The webinar featured HealthStream’s Tom Emberson, VP, Workforce Validate, Caroline Shirley, Product Manager, Workforce Validate, and Austin Cooper, Regional Manager, Workforce Validate.

Staying on top of license and certification validations in healthcare is a tall order - to put it mildly. Healthcare organizations need to monitor the status of employees, contractors and vendors. The numbers of employees can range well into the thousands for larger organizations and the changing regulatory landscape and the constantly growing and changing employee rosters don’t make the task any easier.

While it may not be easy, it is essential. Failing to execute on this critical process can result in increased risk to the organization and its patients, financial penalties and, in some cases, the loss of public trust.

Workforce Validate – A Solution for Managing Workforce Compliance

Emberson began with an overview of Workforce Validate. The solution includes automated, ongoing license verification and certification monitoring, as well as sanction and exclusion monitoring. Users can feel comfortable with this solution because HealthStream has more than 20 years of experience validating providers and performs more than 1 million verifications each year.

The validations are provided via primary sources for state boards. The validations are automated and ongoing and Workforce Validate includes reporting that will help leaders know precisely when licenses and certifications are due to expire.

Best of all, HealthStream offers this automated license verification tool free of charge to users with a subscription to the HealthStream platform and you can get started by simply syncing your employer, contractor and vendor databases to Workforce Validate.

Workforce Validate – A Smart Way to Improve Compliance and Reduce Risk

Cooper demonstrated some of Workforce Validate’s key features beginning with the dashboard. The dashboard includes a snapshot of the total workforce and shows employees whose licenses or certifications are expired or are due to expire soon (within a 90-day window.) The dashboard also highlights any sanctions so that leaders can take immediate action.

The software provides notifications relieving leaders of some of the burden of employee notifications. “As the expiration date gets closer, starting at 45 days and all the way up to the expiration date, Workforce Validate will send emails to the administrator and to the employee,” said Cooper.

Workforce Validate also provides the kind of reporting that helps to reduce risk and makes compliance easier. Users can review aggregated data, but they can also drill down into specific results. This allows users to see specifically where the license comes from as well as the auditable date and time stamp of when the license board was last queried and verified the license. The information includes a hyperlink to the specific board that provided the licensing information so that users can see that the license is indeed current at the board level and see all of the information that would be reported at that level.

Information can also be reported at a more granular level. Users are able to drill down into licensing and certification information for individual employees. By simply clicking on employee, users are able to see all of the relevant information about that employee. The information includes their title within the organization, and a snapshot of the most recent verification of their license, as well as any sanctions.

Workforce Validate and My Team

In addition to the excellent reporting and monitoring features, Workforce Validate’s license product is designed to seamlessly integrate with My Team. All of the great data that is checked and reported on Workforce Validate is pushed to the My Team Dashboard. From there, nurse managers are able to see information on upcoming license and certification expirations. Essentially, this integration gives a wide swath of your organization access to the data and the autonomy with which to act upon the information.