Baton Health, a Redesign Health company, is launching a Universal Primary Source database that allows credentialing teams to identify and pull relevant information from a single query.
The solution cuts away at inefficiencies and time-consuming manual data entry by credentialing staff and can cut overhead credentialing costs for organizations by 75%, according to the company.
Baton Health, which raised $8.75 million in seed funding, has already partnered with telehealth giant Amwell, Mocingbird, The Clinic by Cleveland Clinic and Brevard Health Alliance, a federally qualified health center in Florida. The database will open to general availability in the coming months.
Nearly all players in the healthcare system have to interact with credentialing, said Robert Coombs, Baton Health founder and CEO, said. The process takes, on average, from two to six months and nearly 20 hours of manual data entry and time spent verifying primary sources.
Enter Baton Health. The company's database cuts down on manual data entry and provides primary source information in seconds, the company said.
The product identifies and returns every license, for every state, for every practitioner via a single query. Coombs told Fierce Healthcare the product saves systems money by speeding up credentialing so that providers can start seeing patients and bring revenue into the company. Inefficient credentialing can cost up to $200,000 per month per practitioner in lost revenue, a press release by Baton says.
The technology is beneficial for virtual care organizations, whose providers are often licensed in multiple states, if not dozens of states. However, the solution is equally useful for traditional healthcare providers, payers, software platforms, or anyone who is touching primary sources, Coombs said.
“[Credentialing] is a $20 billion or more expenditure in healthcare every year. And a pretty large portion of that goes to subsidizing manual data entry,” Coombs said.
He also stressed that credentialing teams won’t lose their jobs with the solution but will be able to complete other important tasks. While credentialing teams work in a complex regulatory and compliance space, Coombs said their technology and processes are often outdated compared to the rest of healthcare.
“There's really no excuse for continuing to do things the way we did 30 or 40 years ago, when the reality is we are able to solve this problem once and for all today. It has a massive potential financial impact if we can reduce those costs and increase their ability to unlock revenue,” Coombs said.