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Smarter Vendor Screening and Onboarding During COVID-19

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Maintaining a healthy supply chain involves an extensive exclusion monitoring process for healthcare vendors (including owners, managers, employees), contractors, and third parties.

Screening these entities and individuals protects your organization from fraudulent activity and fines and penalties associated with doing business with ineligible vendors. Optimal control of your supply chain compliance depends on obtaining accurate and actionable data. 

Gathering the most comprehensive data from vendors, owners, and managers of third parties is critical to stay compliant and have relevant information for each fiscal year. This allows many processes involved in supply chain management to run smoother, from billing to procurement, and compliance to operations.

More traditional means of obtaining vendor data has involved more in-person activities, and now that COVID-19 is creating many new safety requirements, your organization must find a smarter and safer alternative.

Smarter Vendor Onboarding During COVID-19

Don’t rely on kiosks and physical contact. 

Some vendor credentialing solutions rely heavily on in-person interactions, kiosk visits, or other situations involving physical contact. During COVID-19, with serious limitations on visitors and extensive safety requirements in place, healthcare organizations need a smarter way to track and onboard new vendors. A low-touch system with an intuitive online signup process and digital touchpoints keep your vendors informed, your facilities and staff safe, and provides a means to collect more data about the people and companies you rely on. 

As more businesses are continuing to shift online during the pandemic, a digital presence and effective email and digital communication strategy help keep everyone informed. With a smarter vendor screening and onboarding solution, you can do everything online and support team members who may be working remotely. 

Unfortunately, relying on in-person visits or utilizing a solution with minimal screening reach for capturing data for multiple individuals (owners, managers, admins, employees, etc.) leaves your healthcare organization vulnerable to fraudulent activity. You need more information, and in this case, it’s important not to just take one contact, visitor, or profile’s word for it.

Healthcare Vendor Screening 

In accordance with Sections 1128 and 1156 of the Social Security Act, HHS OIG mandates that healthcare organizations not do business with “excluded or sanctioned” individuals or entities, regardless of the service they provide. This means provider organizations are responsible for ensuring their network of vendors and their owners are not excluded on any state or federal list. 

Onboarding healthcare vendors can be a time consuming and messy process. Data may live in multiple systems and reconciling vendor records is difficult or nearly impossible. VendorProof by ProviderTrust, makes the onboarding process more manageable by configuring a custom new vendor workflow for your organization. Vendors provide their business information and then that data flows back into your organization’s existing system, ensuring each department has the information it needs.

Are you meeting all screening requirements for vendor compliance?

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Healthcare Vendor Communication During the Pandemic

Getting messages out to your large healthcare vendor network can be challenging if you don’t have the right tools. When it comes to the urgency of messaging and new guidelines coming each day during COVID-19, it’s important to have a turn-key solution to notify vendors of new requirements and announcements from your organization. 

If you need to notify vendors of any process changes or new requirements, you may be stuck tracking down contact information and exchanging multiple forms. But when your vendors engage with you by enrolling in an online portal, you can communicate with them easily.


Protecting Your Supply Chain 

An efficient and trustworthy supply chain is critical during COVID-19. You must be able to meet the needs of your clinicians, patients, and staff in this unprecedented time. Emergency situations can sometimes leave companies most vulnerable to fraudulent activity because of bad actors looking to take advantage of chaotic circumstances.

What Does Vendor Fraud Look Like? 

  • False claims
  • Breach of contract
  • Kickback schemes
  • Excluded Individuals and Entities

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Interested in learning more about vendor compliance, onboarding, and communications?

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