Credential Validation for Epic Users in Ambulatory Offices

By: Dr. Walter Reiling, MD, system vice president and chief medical information officer, Premier Health

To ensure physicians and APPs using the Premier Epic system are all appropriately credentialed, Premier Health will begin a process to validate the credentials of users who currently do not have hospital privileges. Recently, there has been an increase in the number of physicians and APPs using Epic in an office environment and not holding membership in the medical staff at any Premier Health facility. Effective January 30, 2020, Epic users who do not have membership in the hospital medical staff at Atrium Medical Center, Miami Valley Hospital, or Upper Valley Medical Center will have to make a one-time visit to the medical staff office at one of the hospitals to establish proof of identity and validate license, DEA, and any collaborative agreement information. Failure to complete this process will result in removal of Epic access. This will ensure compliance with ePrescribing rules mandated at the federal level. Some affected providers have completed this process over the past year to gain access to send controlled substances electronically. Those individuals will not have to repeat the process.

This will apply to physicians and APPs only. Nurses, MAS, and other staff will not be impacted. Any provider already credentialed by the medical staff office at any of our hospitals should not take any further action. If you need to begin the process, contact the medical staff office at any Premier Health hospital.

Back to the December 2019 issue of Premier Pulse.