Five Rivers Health Centers is an Ohio-based healthcare provider with approximately 260 employees working across nine locations. The organization offers 25 different service lines, providing primary and specialty care services to more than 25,000 patients.

Five Rivers is federally funded, which means that they must demonstrate to the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) that every healthcare professional who sees patients at their sites is appropriately credentialed and privileged. Tracking the credentials of and licensures of every doctor, mid-level provider, nurse, clinical staff member, and third-party provider who works at a Five Rivers site – from professional licenses and Drug Enforcement Administration certificates to life support training, medical school attended, and residencies completed – is critical to maintaining their funding status. Keeping all the necessary credentials’ data up to date became time-consuming as the organization grew, and the Five Rivers team knew they needed to make the shift from physical to digital documentation. The team explored a specialized medical credential tracking system, but it quickly became apparent that it would take too much manual work to maintain. “You had to jump through hoops to get any of the information that you needed,” said Five Rivers’ Chief Medical Officer (CMO).“It was almost like you were duplicating a lot of your processes to fit into what they had. We really struggled with the credentialing process and keeping it all sorted for at least three years prior to switching over to Evisort.”

To fulfill their credential tracking needs, the Five Rivers team turned to Evisort. “We were already using Evisort for the contract management, and I said ‘Is credential management something Evisort could do for us?’” said the CMO.

Although the Evisort platform is built for contract management, its versatility allows for tracking a wide range of document types. Combined with its ease of implementation and use, the platform became the ideal solution for Five Rivers to monitor provider credentials.

The Five Rivers team easily uploaded the credentials they needed to track into Evisort. “Prior to using Evisort, I had to upload all the pages individually,” said an executive assistant with Five Rivers. “Now, I can upload 10 documents at one time. That was my ‘aha’ moment with the platform because I knew it was going to save me so much time.”

After uploading the documents, the team could organize the files in a way that works best for them; they didn’t have to reconfigure the files to work with a rigid, predetermined system. Evisort’s artificial intelligence extracts expiration date information and automatically sends notifications to let the team know when a particular document is about to expire and how much time they have before it does.

“Everyone we track has a digital folder with all their documents in it,” said the CMO. “If Evisort tells us a document is about to expire, we’ll just upload the new document, and the old one moves to that folder. So, it has really simplified the process and ensures we’re not missing anything.”

Evisort’s credential tracking capability has also helped Five Rivers comply with the Federal Tort Claims Act. In the event of a malpractice lawsuit, the organization must show credentials for the person named in the suit. If necessary, the team can now quickly demonstrate that they took the necessary steps to verify the credentials of their employees and affiliates

Before using it to manage credentials, Five Rivers relied on Evisort as a contract management system to help them remain compliant with HRSA. HRSA conducts an audit every three years to assess the organization’s administrative, clinical, and financial operations and the contracts that support these areas.

Five Rivers’ contracts were previously stored either as physical files or as PDF files on hard drives, which made tracking contract language and expiration dates difficult. “When we have HRSA site visits, the reviewers look at all of our contracts to see if they’re in compliance,” said Five Rivers’ Chief Financial Officer (CFO). “Before we used Evisort, our contracts were housed in a room filled with filing cabinets, and we had to rely on historical knowledge to know if a contract had expired.”

Using Evisort, the Five Rivers team has been able to quickly upload, digitize, and centralize contracts. They can efficiently search for specific, required language across their contracts and update or add any information. “A couple of months ago, we were talking about a contract we had with an organization, and we were wondering, ‘Do we have that clause in there or not?’” the CMO added. “And our CFO said, ‘I’ll just use Evisort… and yes, we do!’”

Preparing for HRSA site visits is now much more efficient using Evisort. Before implementing the platform, it took a week to make sure the Five Rivers team had compiled all the documents required for an audit. With a centralized contract repository, standardized naming conventions, and the speed of AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM), that process now only takes one day.

“We’re under a very strict time crunch when we get ready for an audit. Plus, we have to keep up with our daily work, ”said Five Rivers’ CFO. “Using Evisort, we get back those extra days we would’ve used preparing for the audit. It definitely puts us in a better position to be successful.”