Medversant Awarded Automated Continuous Credentialing Patent

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The United States Patent and Trademark Office awarded Medversant Technologies a breakthrough patent relating to automatically verifying credentials on a continuous basis. The patent advances the company's position in provider data management and covers technologies that allow healthcare organizations to manage provider information. The “Electronic Credentials Verification and Management System” (U.S. Patent 7,529,682) is a foundational patent for the company and provides for a system for storing, continually verifying, and retrieving credentials records in a global network environment.

“Amazingly, tens of thousands of healthcare organizations continue to perform the entire credentialing process on their own. Many of these discrete processes, such as credentials verification, are mostly unrelated to care delivery. To make matters worse, the same providers are being credentialed several times over.”

Matthew Haddad, Medversant’s president and CEO, says, "In addition to securing intellectual property protection for this novel process, we believe this key patent grant underscores Medversant's strength in healthcare technology, application services, and process re-engineering.”

Qin Ye, M.D., senior vice president of Information Technology at Medversant, adds, "The award of this patent builds and reinforces Medversant’s position as an innovator and leader in healthcare technology. We are delivering an innovation that is solving real customer problems and driving the achievement of continuous real-time credentials verification.”

Medversant’s patented technology, AutoVerifi™, is utilized by health plans, hospitals, and other providers of care throughout the United States and is a key component of Medversant’s OneSource, ClaimGard™, MedMonitored™, and HRSource™ solutions.

Patent Paves Way For Continuously Credentialed Provider Data Clearinghouses

The healthcare administrative process known as “credentialing” is an area fraught with inefficiency with billions of dollars being spent each year by healthcare organizations across the country on duplicative processes. Healthcare professionals are required to be licensed and to undergo rigorous screening before practicing their profession. For example, healthcare practitioners, such as physicians, are typically required by federal, state, and regulatory agencies to have a thorough check of credentials information from a variety of sources when initially applying to hospitals, health maintenance organizations, independent physician associations, and other healthcare entities. In addition, once approved by an entity, the practitioner’s credentials must be re-checked at periodic intervals through the course of his or her tenure with the healthcare entity.

Dwayne Gathers, of Gathers Strategies, a healthcare consultancy group, states, “Amazingly, tens of thousands of healthcare organizations continue to perform the entire credentialing process on their own. Many of these discrete processes, such as credentials verification, are mostly unrelated to care delivery. To make matters worse, the same providers are being credentialed several times over.”

According to the Medical Group Management Association, an average of 17.86 credentialing applications per year are submitted by each group practice physician.

“Because of the amount of data that must be collected and verified, an automated system is essential to provide a cost-effective solution for this costly and time consuming process,” states Haddad. Medversant has created pockets of efficiency in the provider data management area by setting up clearinghouses in which provider data is centralized and accessed by numerous stakeholders.

Recently, the State of Michigan selected Medversant to centralize credentials verification processes through such a clearinghouse under a Medicaid Transformation Grant in an effort to streamline the process, reduce costs, and provide real-time access to continuously updated information. In addition, Medversant is strategically aligned with America’s Health Insurance Plans to bring administrative efficiencies to their constituency.

About Medversant

Medversant, LLC is the nation’s leading provider of continuously monitored Web-based credentials verification solutions through patented AutoVerifi™ technology (U.S. Patent 7,529,682) for hospitals, health insurance plans, nursing homes, outpatient centers and other healthcare settings. Medversant provides a software tool that is highly efficient, cost-effective and an accurate solution for provider database management. Headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif., Medversant can be reached at (213) 291-6139 or www.medversant.com.

About Gathers Strategies, Inc.

Gathers Strategies, Inc. is a business development consulting practice, based in Los Angeles, Calif., with a healthcare solutions practice area focused on assessing and advocating effective risk management strategies to private and public health care clients.
Contact: dgathers@gathersstrategies.com or 213.291.6199.