Managed service provider system for collaborative healthcare scheduling, credentialing, and compliance across shared suppliers

Abstract

An MSP platform provides contingent healthcare worker recruiting and shift assignation in a multilayered process of job order broadcasting, competency matching, proposals from healthcare agencies aka vendors, screening, compliance management, and onboard of each candidate. Each staff profile submitted has to go through multilayered review, approval, and orientation process. Additionally, each healthcare worker's calendar, credential, and compliance have to be managed across multiple employers to prevent scheduling conflict and compliance violations, and guaranteeing full visibility of all healthcare workers across the entire supply chain. MSPs (Managed Service Providers) have the ability to service a large number of facilities on whose behalf the MSPs generate job orders for contingent workforce, and manage fulfillment using suppliers (aka vendors) mapped to the facility being serviced. The supplier ecosystem is a cohesive block that may be shared across all MSPs, and several such MSP ecosystems should be allowed to coexist in the system. Suppliers can be tiered by geography allowing a large vendor network to track demand from one or more healthcare facilities across a single location or a group of vendor locations. Additionally, a facility that is part of an MSP should also be able to work directly with all suppliers either in conjunction with or independent of an MSP. Both long term assignments referred to as ‘Travel’ position, and on-demand shift assignments referred to as ‘Day-to-day’ position are serviceable under this centrally available software commonly referred to as ‘Software as a Service’.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The invention relates to methods and a managed service provider (MSP) system for managing collaborative credentialing, compliance, and scheduling of contingent healthcare workers by multiple MSPs and healthcare facilities. More particularly, the invention relates to automatically fulfilling job requisitions, either travel or day-to-day workers, by employing services of suppliers available across the MSP system.DISCUSSION OF THE RELATED ART[0002]The traditional credentialing, compliance, and scheduling systems operate independently, and without an integrated process spanning the healthcare facility's stakeholders, the suppliers' stakeholders, and the healthcare workers. Such systems may be addressing the needs of a single healthcare facility in isolation without taking into account the overall demand, thereby creating an architecture that is built on simple data-exchange mechanism failing to see the overarching demand and availability in the context of the...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0011]The disclosed embodiments include a method for creating an MSP's Supplier (aka. Agency) ecosystem. The supplier ecosystem is shared with other MSPs. This effectively creates a marketplace between MSPs and suppliers. Each supplier can create its individual locations, and group such locations into national and regional hierarchies. Such groups belong to the same EIN (Employer Identification Number), which enables tracking of business operations at local, national, or regional level.

[0018]The method is used by agency administrators to respond to a job order by proposing one or more candidates best suited for the job order. Job order is surfaced in the supplier's requisition queue, from where the Agency Administrator can select a specific job order and propose a viable candidate for the job by using an automated search for matching all qualified healthcare workers. The search shows all constraints in the context of the job order, compliance violations, and history of past and current proposals for each candidate along with their current onboard status with various healthcare facilities. This prevents over subscription of healthcare worker and avoids unnecessary withdrawals for an over-extended worker.

[0019]On proposing a candidate, the Agency Administrator can monitor the job order in the requisition queue as the candidate moves through various stages of the onboard process at the facility where proposed, therefore experiencing complete transparency in the entire onboard process. Additionally, the Agency Administrator receives alerts during onboard for additional documents, errors and omissions, interview date, offer acceptance, orientation dates, and alerts for cancelled or denied orders.

Problems solved by technology

In summary, a healthcare worker cannot provide services until the worker is properly whetted, oriented, and continuously tracked for any compliance violation.

When this level of information is not easily available, it is impossible to create rich collaboration experience.

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