5 Biggest Challenges To Onboarding Healthcare Professionals

Onboarding healthcare professionals can be an overwhelming and complex process, especially in today’s fast-paced healthcare environment. With high turnover rates, the need to maintain strict compliance standards, and the unique training needs of healthcare workers, organizations often find themselves struggling to streamline the process. If not properly managed, these challenges can lead to costly inefficiencies, increased administrative burdens, and potential compliance risks.

In this post, we’ll dive into the five biggest challenges healthcare organizations face when onboarding new providers and explore potential solutions to make the process faster, smoother, and more efficient.

1. Manual Processes

The volume of tasks (54 per new hire!) and the complexity of compliance regulations make manual processes increasingly unsustainable. Most healthcare roles require completion of 15 to 20 courses for regulatory compliance. Each has to be assigned and tracked, with reminders sent to ensure it’s done in a timely manner. It’s even more complex because each role, department, and location has different training requirements. As you can imagine, this approach is inefficient and prone to error.

58% of respondents said manual processes and a lack of automation are the biggest barriers to achieving full compliance

According to a 2024 MedTrainer poll

Healthcare onboarding software can automate the process, giving you confidence in your compliance and time back in your day. Based on employee role, department, and location, all required courses are assigned, along with policies to acknowledge, and HR forms to complete. Completion reminders are automatically sent, certificates issued, and reports populate in real time. You’ve gone from 54 tasks down to one!

2. High Turnover Rates

In healthcare, particularly in Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), high turnover rates are a constant challenge. A seeming revolving door of personnel means you’re always getting new hires up-to-speed —- and never fast enough. Departing staff have left a gap that you’re being pressured to fill with no end in sight.

This volume requires efficient, repeatable onboarding processes that can be scaled. You can’t take the chance that you’ll forget to share a policy or that one of your locations will go rogue and create their own infection control training that doesn’t meet OSHA’s requirements.

A comprehensive compliance solution can help manage turnover more effectively with standardization across all departments and locations. Automation eliminates common delays to significantly reduce the time it takes to onboard a new providers. The takeaway here is that a slow or inefficient onboarding process isn’t just inconvenient — it’s a barrier to providing high-quality care.

3. Completing Credentialing

Credentialing is one of the most critical, yet challenging, aspects of healthcare onboarding. It’s time-consuming and tedious to ensure providers meet all necessary qualifications, licensing, and compliance requirements. Not to mention, in many organizations, the people completing credentialing are also juggling many other responsibilities, which can lead to delays and frustration from the provider and leadership.

Following a standard workflow can help you tackle the challenges standing in the way of getting new providers onboarded. The same tasks completed in the same order mean you’re always ready for what’s next in the process. Get on track with this enrollment application checklist. Credentialing software can also put you on the right track with customizable workflows, automated reminders and expiration notices, automated license verification and more.

4. Personalizing the Process

Each healthcare professional has a unique set of responsibilities based on their role, department, and location, making the onboarding process far from one-size-fits-all. For example, the training and compliance materials required for a nurse in one location are different from those needed for a facility manager in another location — even if it is the same organization. Beyond what’s required, this personalized approach is what ensures new hires are confident and ready for their specific role.

Manually figuring out which courses and policies apply to which role, then assigning them one at a time is a recipe for disaster. It’s overwhelming and stressful to think about what you might have missed.

Technology offers a standardized, repeatable process. Spend the time to determine everything needed by role, department, and location, then onboard new hires using this pre-set workflow. You can take that automation even further when your software systems integrate. A smooth, personalized onboarding process can be easier than you think — improving retention rates and employee satisfaction in the process.

5. Pressure to Go Faster

In healthcare, time is money, so there’s always pressure to onboard and credential healthcare professionals faster. However, there isn’t room for cutting corners when it comes to life-saving policies, procedures, and training. That means HR and compliance professionals are delicately balancing speed with accuracy.

The danger here is that speeding up the process without the right tools can lead to compliance issues or unsafe practices. With manual processes and a fragmented onboarding system, onboarding is slowed and revenue is impacted.

When you streamline onboarding processes, reduce unnecessary manual tasks, and prepare in advance, you can be both fast and accurate. Technology is the best way to do that.

Onboard Like a Pro with MedTrainer

With challenges like manual processes, high turnover, credentialing bottlenecks, and the need for a personalized experience, it’s clear that healthcare organizations need a streamlined, automated approach to onboarding.

The good news is that technology is here to help. By adopting a digital solution that centralizes and automates onboarding tasks, healthcare organizations can significantly reduce administrative burdens, improve compliance, and ensure that providers are ready to contribute right away.

Nearly 70% of poll respondents report spending 3+ hours of admin time onboarding each new employee—imagine how much time you could save by switching to an integrated solution. With the right tools, like MedTrainer’s one-click new hire onboarding, you could reduce hours of tasks to minutes.

Ready to overcome your onboarding challenges? Reach out and start saving time, reducing errors, and improving compliance today!