Being a surgeon is a great career. However, sometimes a surgeon has to deal with medical staff and credentialing. Thankfully for most surgeons this is a rare occurrence and they only have to think about it whenever they start at a new hospital. When working as a locums or per diem surgeon this is a problem that is encountered on a frequent basis. There is no standardized credentialing application. And to make matters worse despite having the same requirements at almost every single hospital, without the same forms, new letters of recommendation and new verifications are required continuously.
As a surgeon that works at different facilities the problem compounds itself because when you work at numerous places you have to get more more and more verifications and the problem expands exponentially causing a great bureaucratic burden.
My dream would be to have a standardized credentialing system and a unified verification platform that would allow hospitals to indicate when a surgeon has worked at a particular location much like the FCVS system works. Another irksome aspect of this is requiring frequent letters of recommendation. These letters of recommendation are oftentimes accompanied with an evaluation form. It would be so much simpler if this could be done annually and logged into a unified database where it could be accessed by all credentialing bodies.
We live in an era where cars drive themselves and our phones have more computing power than ever before. It does not seem like it would be a difficult process for a large accrediting body such as JCHAO to provide a service such as this. In an era where we value and accountability is prized this is one area of Medicine that is lagging far, far behind.