Background screening is vital for meeting regulatory and accreditation standards in healthcare, but because background checks are triggered at the time of offer, they are largely considered a necessary evil of the pre-employment process. Once an employer decides to hire an individual, they have been through requisition creation, multiple interviews, and even pre-hire assessments, all before an offer is made. This puts tremendous pressure on the background screening partner and the entire onboarding process to ensure that the new hire is making it into the earliest orientation possible. The future of background screening has arrived and employers that partner with the most forward-thinking screening companies could benefit from a shift toward verified credentials and self-sovereign profiles in 2021.

The Velocity Network Foundation and its members are creating a way to take traditional career credentials, such as a completed degree, past employment history, different hard skills, and training certifications, and allow individuals to claim those as a blockchain record in a digital wallet. Here at PreCheck, along with our parent company Cisive, we’re proud to be leading the way in leveraging the Velocity technology framework to create valuable solutions for multiple use cases for U.S. healthcare systems and hospitals.

By leveraging this disruptive technology we will help our clients to adapt traditional background screening practices to a more efficient, more affordable, and faster process. This paradigm shift in the way that career credentials are verified and accessed, will improve the process and experience for everyone in the recruitment and onboarding ecosystem.

Meeting Healthcare’s Specific Needs

The nursing shortage is only getting worse, and with such fierce competition for talent, you need every advantage in reduced time-to-hire and improved candidate experience. Traditional background screening processes take a few days for results to come back, wasting valuable time between the offer stage and orientation. When you have high demand, you need people on the floor caring for patients as soon as possible.

Velocity Network Foundation’s technology eliminates the need to request records because they’re already contained in one place via blockchain or distributed ledger technology. This speeds up time-to-hire and improves the candidate experience because you can screen a new hire and get to work within a day, as opposed to waiting three to five days for traditional background checks. This reduces costs, too, since the administrative burden is significantly reduced on you and your background screening partner.

Improving Credentialing and Monitoring Processes

The benefits of using Velocity’s technology for new hires is clear, but healthcare employers also require maintenance of certain dynamic credentials, too. Healthcare organizations will need a partner who can not only provide primary source verification of career credentials either by inspecting static credentials through an integration with Velocity or conducting the primary source verification on behalf of the healthcare organization, in near real-time. Employers will also need a partner to monitor the status of these credentials and notify them if the credential becomes encumbered or expires. Employees and practitioners can easily share their updated licenses and even immunization records for regular compliance monitoring.

There are implications for talent management, too. As employees engage in professional development, cross-training or reskilling, they can record these activities on their Velocity profile. This gives HR concrete data on performance and ongoing educational requirements for maintaining licenses and credentials.

Minimizing Administrative Burdens

Right now, verifying education, experiences and credentials requires a laborious process of requesting verification from the originating site. But with the Velocity technology framework, static credentials can be verified instantly. These include:

• • Identity
  • Past employment and experiences
  • Completed education
  • Lifetime licenses or certifications

Dynamic credentials will also be accessible through the wallet, but will require periodic updating. These include:

• • Criminal records
  • Licenses and certifications
  • Sanctions and exclusions
  • State registries

Whether you are pulling static or dynamic credentials, they will be accessible on one platform, where they are owned by the individual rather than requiring external verification.

The applications of Velocity Network Foundation’s technology are significant and exciting. This technology makes it possible to streamline background screening and credentialing processes at your healthcare organization without sacrificing quality. Want to learn more about this new technology? Speak to a PreCheck expert today to learn how we can help.