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When it comes to provider onboarding and enrollment, credentialing teams are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The processes are rife with slowdowns and manual tasks, but everyone wants them already done to prevent revenue cycle delays.
In a 2023 MedTrainer survey, nearly a third of organizations polled suffered from costs due to enrollment delays. The average healthcare organization counts on ~$2.3M in annual revenue from each provider, or about $9,000 a day. Any delay in the provider enrollment process means less revenue for the organization. The longer the holdup, the harder the hit.
You can eliminate these delays with the help of automated provider onboarding and enrollment. Automating the routine tasks, streamlining application completion, and using AI to standardize the provider enrollment process make you more efficient and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. The bottom line is that you can get your providers practicing sooner.
How Does Automation Help?
Automating highly structured processes like provider enrollment and onboarding removes much of the guesswork and the legwork for credentialing teams. With automation, credentialers can offload tedious tasks like cross-referencing provider data, pulling documents, and filling applications. When they’re not spending hours on these tasks, internal credentialing teams have time for other to-dos like following up with payers to get a decision quicker. Leveraging the power of APIs and AI, software makes processes faster and more accurate, saving significant time for credentialers, so the provider can practice sooner.
Technology is able to operate with precision, consistency, and tireless accuracy, which are all critical in credentialing. Errors are one of the biggest culprits of revenue loss, with 42% of claim denials caused by provider ineligibility. Ineligibility is often due to a typo or oversight that is much less likely when using automated processes.
By investing in automation, healthcare credentialing teams invest in making their enrollment and onboarding processes maximally efficient, and financial leaders invest in protecting the organization’s revenue cycle.
5 Ways To Speed Up Provider Onboarding and Enrollment
Here are the top 5 ways automated provider onboarding and enrollment can get providers in front of patients faster and speed up revenue generation:
1. Limit Manual Data Entry
Manual data entry is one of the biggest drains on credentialing teams’ time — and a prime source of errors. Software that offers an integrated API connection with databases like Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare (CAQH) puts the most recent and accurate provider information directly into your credentialing workflows.
With this API, software makes consistent manual data entry a thing of the past, eliminating a dreaded task that was easy for credentialers to postpone. The integration automatically syncs profile updates, license expirations, and hundreds of credentialing data points. That means faster enrollment cycles, fewer delays, and a tangible reduction in administrative burden for credentialing teams.
To limit manual data entry, you can also look for software that can auto-extract data from forms. Similar to an API integration, it automatically populates data into the software, giving credentialers time back to focus on other tasks.
2. Simplify Document Collection
Chasing down missing or outdated documents is a major contributor to onboarding delays — and one that automation can virtually eliminate. With automated provider onboarding and enrollment, credentialers can send electronic document requests directly to providers, so it’s simple for them to upload files securely from any device.
Choose a platform that allows you to set required documents by location and specialty, so providers only submit what’s actually needed — no extra uploads, no confusion. A platform that includes automated reminders that continue until all documents are collected reduces the need for manual follow-up by credentialers.
Robust platforms that have AI tools can further speed up the credentialing process with intelligent automation. MedTrainer’s AI Upload Assistant helps by scanning digital documents, sorting them into the right categories, and applying the correct labels without needing someone to supervise the process. The system knows what it’s looking for in licenses, CVs, and training records, and drops each piece into place.
That setup makes document collection fast and reliable. It also helps avoid the usual mess of follow-up emails, manual double-checks, and last-minute scrambles. Fewer roadblocks mean fewer delays. Providers can start on time, and billing doesn’t get pushed back because paperwork was stuck in holding.
3. Increase Visibility
Without the right tools, credentialing teams often don’t know exactly where an application stands or why it’s stalled. Automated provider onboarding and enrollment platforms with customizable credentialing reporting and dashboards let you instantly see where things are slowing down in the process. You can also automate reports to email on a recurring schedule, keeping leadership and stakeholders informed without extra manual effort.
Built-in tools quickly highlight missing information, documents, or enrollments based on the customizations you input, like location or specialty. This level of visibility allows credentialers to resolve issues before they cause delays, while giving executives the data they need to forecast timelines and revenue impacts. Real-time transparency keeps the process moving, reduces last-minute surprises, and lets providers deliver care — and generate revenue — right on schedule.
4. Bulk Actions
Traditional enrollment and onboarding workflows are repetitive and time-consuming. Dozens of steps are required for every provider, and most providers enroll with five to 10 payers. It is a ton of downloading, copying, transcribing, etc. Top-tier platforms have workflows to complete bulk actions, circumventing repetitive tasks to get providers enrolled faster.
If you’re enrolling providers tied to a single tax ID or organizational NPI, look for software with a dedicated page for group enrollments. This simplifies the process without the need for workarounds.
The ability to identify mandatory fields and documents makes it easy to manage document needs for many different provider types. You can group files into a saved template, so you’re no longer searching for each file individually. A reliable system will automatically assign the right documents to the right providers based on their characteristics, giving credentialing admins a faster, simpler way to manage, track, and collect requirements.
By reducing manual work and ensuring complete, accurate records, organizations can grant privileges, maintain compliance with accrediting bodies, and keep operations moving.
5. Automate Enrollment Application Completion
Enrollment applications are notoriously long, with every payer using a different form and requiring different supporting documents. Automated provider onboarding and enrollment software eliminates much of this burden through automatic credentialing packet generation, pulling all the necessary forms and documents for each payer and specialty into one PDF. Using the data already in the credentialing platform, the application auto-fills, instantly adding the verified provider data. This way, credentialing professionals don’t need to retype the same information over and over.
This not only saves hours of manual work per provider but also reduces errors that can lead to costly delays or denials. By automating credentialing packet generation, form-filling, and document matching, credentialers can move multiple payer enrollments forward in parallel, so providers are approved faster and revenue starts flowing sooner.
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How Automated Provider Enrollment and Onboarding Unlocks Revenue
Automated provider enrollment and onboarding makes your healthcare credentialing process faster, more accurate, and less labor-intensive. Credentialers spend less time completing tedious manual tasks, face less risk of error when filling out forms, and can get providers fully enrolled, onboarded, and ready to practice in less time than ever before. It’s the most effective way to reduce delays and fast-track revenue generation.
Here’s how automation unlocks revenue:
- Reduces Costly Delays. Completing onboarding and enrollment faster preserves $9,000 per day, per provider, in revenue. Automation eliminates repetitive manual tasks, shaving days off a manual timeline.
- Limits Claim Denials. Automated data entry eliminates the chance of mistakes and typos that can trigger provider ineligibility claim denials.
- Helps Maintain Valid Credentials. Automated reminders prior to license expiration and recredentialing help to prevent lapses that will result in reimbursement loss and paybacks.
Previously, losing revenue to provider enrollment and onboarding delays was an all too familiar struggle for healthcare organizations and their credentialing teams. It was almost an unavoidable pitfall with the lengthy and complex processes involved in getting new providers ready to practice.
Automation handles the hard parts for you, reducing the time and administrative burden previously associated with provider enrollment and onboarding. With automation, credentialing teams can be confident in their processes, and leadership can be confident in the endurance of their revenue cycle.
Choose the Best Provider Onboarding and Enrollment Software (With Automation!)
Choosing a strong credentialing software is essential to supporting your organization’s goals for enrollment and onboarding efficiency, as well as revenue generation. It’s important to choose a software that supports full-scale provider data management and includes functional automation like AI and API integrations to get the most support for enrollment and onboarding processes.
With MedTrainer’s credentialing platform, you get the tools you need to make provider enrollment and onboarding efficient and easy, such as
CAQH Integration: Automatically pull provider data directly from CAQH into MedTrainer with just a few clicks. Instead of manually copying or re-entering information, MedTrainer directly connects to CAQH to retrieve the latest profile data.
AI-Upload Assistant: Uploaded documents are automatically scanned and categorized based on type, provider, and expiration date. MedTrainer recognizes the document type and knows exactly where to store it.
Auto-Extraction of Data: Relevant information like license numbers, expiration dates, and NPI details are automatically pulled from uploaded forms and populated into the provider’s credentialing profile.
Customizable Reporting: Save enrollment rosters and schedule them to be emailed monthly to internal and external recipients. Use dynamic, color-coded reports to quickly highlight missing information or gaps. Stay on top of due dates, next action, and enrollment status with real-time data that is easy to filter, sort, and export.
Automated enrollment and onboarding software can help your organization level up its credentialing process, support a durable revenue cycle, and revolutionize the way your team works.
Schedule a demo to see how MedTrainer can upgrade your credentialing process today.