How CVOs Promote Health Equity

Health equity isn’t just desirable—it’s a must-have for an equal and just society. This ideal healthcare system would enable everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or zip code, to receive high-quality care. Having a trusted CVO by your side to credential healthcare providers fairly can help promote health equity in multiple ways.

Streamlined and Standardized Credentialing

Traditional credentialing is an exhaustive, time-consuming, and complex process suffering from inefficiencies introduced by manual entry—creating unnecessary hurdles for qualified providers, particularly those from diverse backgrounds.

To level the playing field, CVOs facilitate health equity by setting up standardized, automated and streamlined credentialing processes. Having standardized criteria and evaluation processes to promote objectivity and a lack of bias focuses the credentialing process on a provider’s qualifications, experience, and adherence to ethical standards. This results in a consistent evaluation of all applicants, no matter what race, gender, or socioeconomic status they come from, with a reduction in potential bias that could put certain groups of the community at a clear disadvantage.

Increased Access to Care

Additionally, CVOs utilize technology to smooth the credentialing workflow with features like automated data verification, electronic application systems, and efficient document management. This streamlines and speeds up the credentialing process, enabling faster onboarding of qualified providers, especially in underserved areas where healthcare professional shortages are common. This is crucial to addressing the healthcare disparities we have in our system and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to access timely and high-quality healthcare services.

Diverse Provider Networks

Beyond standardized credentialing, CVOs take us a step further toward health equity by enabling diverse healthcare provider networks—with representation from various demographic groups based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and language proficiency.

CVOs align with healthcare organizations that strive toward having inclusivity in their recruitment processes, and help them attract a diverse pool of qualified providers. Moreover, some CVOs maintain databases of providers categorized by demographics—allowing organizations to search for and connect with qualified providers who cater to the specific needs of their patient populations. A targeted approach like this one leaves a huge impact in underserved communities where providers must have the cultural competency and language skills not just to communicate effectively but to build trust.

As a result of having a diverse provider network, patients often feel more comfortable seeking care from providers who share their cultural backgrounds or understand their unique needs—backed by several studies. This ultimately leads to improved health outcomes for patients from diverse backgrounds.

Quality Assurance and Patient-Centered Care

CVOs also ensure that the quality of healthcare provided within the system is up to par. They go above and beyond merely verifying licenses and certifications by conducting a deep analysis of the provider’s clinical competencies such as assessing a provider's practice history, board certifications, and ongoing medical education activities.

Moreover, CVOs also take ethics into account—a provider's adherence to established standards—by verifying that the said provider has practiced medicine with integrity and professionalism with no history of disciplinary actions.

Lastly, CVOs ensure the provider delivers patient-centered care—evaluating their experience in shared decision-making and communication skills.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

It’s impossible to keep systems functioning effectively without making decisions backed by solid data. CVOs are uniquely and naturally positioned to use data analytics to promote health equity. This is achieved through the analysis of large amounts of data covering provider demographics, geographic distribution, and credentialing trends. In this way, CVOs can easily investigate and help fix disparities.

For example, a CVO can study a trend in provider credentialing, indicating bias or unequal access to opportunities—by simply looking at application rejection rates by demographic group or geographical location. If they were to do this manually, it might never be as effective or fast. Furthermore, CVOs can analyze data about provider deployment to pinpoint areas with inadequate representation of healthcare professionals.

With data, CVOs can identify underserved communities facing shortages of specific types of providers—such as mental health specialists or multilingual primary care physicians.

How can this help us make better decisions to achieve health equity? With a data-driven understanding of where and what disparities exist, all stakeholders can take targeted action involving:

• Healthcare organizations: Implementing targeted recruitment initiatives to attract providers from underrepresented groups or offering financial incentives to practice in underserved areas.
• Policymakers: Developing programs or grants to encourage medical students from diverse backgrounds to pursue specific specialties or practice locations.
• CVOs: Partnering with healthcare organizations in underserved areas to streamline credentialing processes and expedite provider onboarding.

By ensuring that healthcare providers are credentialed fairly and efficiently, CVOs contribute to the creation of a more equitable healthcare system where all individuals have access to high-quality care that meets their unique needs.

The Certify Difference

Certify, a reputable, NCQA-certified CVO, enables countless B2B healthcare organizations like yours to play their part in bringing about health equity and discouraging disparities. Fair evaluations, efficient workflows, and data-driven decision-making is the cornerstone of our credentialing process. Certify cuts down wait times for providers to join networks—something highly important for underserved communities that may have fewer healthcare providers or face challenges finding in-network providers.

To learn more about Certify, reach out to sales@certifyos.com to chat with a member of our team—or request a demo to see our platform in action.