Healthcare is a high-stakes industry that requires significant skill, discretion, and trust. Hospitals and other medical organizations need to ensure they hire employees who will represent their organization well and care for patients competently and ethically.
Healthcare background checks should include education verification, a national sex offender search, identity verification checks, drug screening, and more. These steps can decrease exposure to negligent-hire lawsuits.
Education/Employment Verification
Before starting a new position in the healthcare industry, all employees must undergo a thorough healthcare background check to ensure compliance with industry regulations and standards.
Some occupations require specific degrees and credentials, so hiring someone who doesn’t meet these qualifications presents a severe risk of negligence on the company’s part. This can include health and fitness professionals, nurses, teachers, lawyers, and others. It can also apply to positions needing expertise backed by specific certifications, such as cosmetologists or plumbers. Unlike criminal records searches, education background checks aren’t restricted by the FCRA as far back as other reviews can be, so they can usually be conducted on an applicant’s entire educational history. This includes high school, college, graduate degree claims, and trade or professional schools.
Unfortunately, applicants often embellish or lie about their academic background in applications and resumes. According to a recent survey, 75% of employers have caught applicants lying about their qualifications on their applications. This can create a massive company problem and lead to negligent hiring lawsuits.
Running an education verification background check on every candidate you consider hiring is essential to prevent this. This quick process authenticates their claimed academic credentials and degrees during the pre-employment screening. To do so, the CRA should contact their claimed schools and request their transcripts and verification of degrees earned. Some colleges and universities will only release this information if the student has signed a consent form. Other institutions may have strict privacy policies and require the applicant to access their records as a former student.
Federal Exclusion Search
This search utilizes the federal government’s List of Excluded Individuals/Entities (LEIE), which identifies individuals and entities excluded from participation in Medicare, Medicaid, and other Federal healthcare programs. The LEIE is updated monthly, so healthcare employers should include this search in their standard pre-hire screening and regularly after that. Many states maintain LEIEs and sanctions databases that healthcare employers may wish to have in their screening.
Employing or contracting with excluded individuals and entities is generally prohibited, whether working in a physician practice, hospital, clinic, or another capacity or setting whereby Medicare or other Federal health care programs reimburse for the items or services provided. Employers that do so risk civil monetary penalties.
The LEIE search should be conducted before hiring new employees and contracting with practitioners, vendors, or suppliers. It should be performed regularly as part of a healthcare sanction screening process that includes state Medicaid and LEIE searches, System for Award Management (SAM) federal contracting database searches, and the FBI’s Most Wanted List, among other sources. Most qualified consumer reporting agencies can offer a comprehensive healthcare sanctions screening that combines these searches and others to provide an integrated view of potential risks for healthcare organizations. This is one of the critical components in a robust compliance program that will minimize healthcare-related risk and protect your organization from monetary and reputational liability.
Criminal Record Check
A criminal record check is critical to any screening process and especially important for healthcare. If a nurse, doctor, or any other healthcare employee has a history of theft, drug abuse, patient neglect, or even a misdemeanor offense, it can put the health and safety of your patients at risk.
A national sex offender search is another crucial component of any medical background check. These searches pull information from all states and territories to identify candidates who are registered sex offenders. With more than a million registered sex offenders in the United States, this search can help limit your risk by ensuring that your healthcare employees don’t come into contact with vulnerable populations.
Employers should also consider checking the applicant’s identity to ensure that the person who applied is the person who appears in the background report. This step is crucial in healthcare because employees can access powerful medications that could be used for illegal purposes if misused. It’s also worth checking disciplinary records to see if any healthcare employees have been disciplined by their state boards in the past. This is vital, especially for doctors and nurses who are held to the highest professional standards in an industry that often works with life-or-death situations.
Drug Screening
Drug screening is often a necessary part of a background check. Employers know that employees who abuse drugs can be a safety hazard to patients and coworkers, as they are more likely to miss work due to substance use, cause workplace accidents in which others are harmed, file workers’ compensation claims, and otherwise negatively affect productivity and morale. Therefore, many companies require applicants and current employees to undergo routine drug testing.
The most common type of drug test is a urine test. This checks for the presence of illegal drugs and alcohol in someone’s system, even after the effects have worn off. The test can detect traces of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines, opiates, nicotine, and alcohol. It can also be customized to screen for a specific type of drug or certain xenobiotics, such as the sedative analgesic oxycodone or the anti-anxiety medication lorazepam.
Other drug tests include mouth swabs, blood, and hair testing. However, the most reliable test for illegal drug and alcohol use is a urine sample. It is essential for an employer to carefully create and implement a drug testing policy, which should be in writing and shared with both applicants and current employees. It should include information about the confidentiality of results, a statement on reasonable suspicion of drug testing, and a list of consequences for an employee who returns a positive impact for any reason.