Accelerating Therapist Onboarding at UpLift

Background

The approval and onboarding process for therapists could take up to 2 months, and these providers couldn’t onboard to the UpLift platform until they passed quality assurance.

We were signing providers at a growing pace, and the low and slow rate of activation was putting stress on the business. Only ~60% of providers who sign end up activating.

The focus of 2023 was operational excellence, and to achieve our company goals, we needed to rethink provider onboarding.

The Team

This would be a multi-phase, multi-month project involving many different stakeholders and end users. I oversaw product managers, UX writers, marketing managers, and designers, as well as coordinated with operations, sales, data, and engineering to complete this initiative

How is provider onboarding holding UpLift back?

  • There is a large gap from when providers sign their contract to when they actually onboard onto the product, leaving plenty of time for them to forget UpLift value props.

  • Because of the way our custom engagement platform is set up, we can’t do any marketing or transactional outreach to providers until they are onboarded to the platform.

  • There is no first-time user experience. Providers are thrown directly into the platform with little guidance on what they need to do to be matched with new clients.

  • We rely heavily on manual processes to facilitate activation. This is not scalable.

  • Providers have to use several different platforms to complete credentialing. Providers often don’t realize or don’t understand the information that needs to be done to complete this process, and as a result around 20% of signed providers get stuck in credentialing.

  • There is no clear source of truth of where the provider lies within the onboarding process: external platforms (Medallion, CAQH, Kustomer) and the product have conflicting information.

How might we…

I provided my team with the following vision and metrics for success:

Vision

Provider onboarding is driven by product rather than disparate manual processes. Providers are introduced to the product directly after signing and they are guided through the steps they need to take to go live. Because they no longer have to wait until credentialing committee approval to access the product, they can make headway on their profile, schedule, and training concurrent to credentialing. 

Admin is built out to become the source of truth—provider status, licensures, and accepted payers will all be verified in the product. Provider status will guide admin tasks, so it is clear when and what actions need to be taken. Admin build out will reduce the number of manual interventions required, and allow us to scale up providers without scaling up onboarding associates at the same rate. 

Metrics for success

1. Time from sign to go live decreases by 10 days

2. Percentage of providers who activate after signing increases to 70%  

3. Manual outreach from Onboarding associate decreases by 30%

Solutions

Therapists are invited to the platform immediately after signing. They are able to complete their tasks while our credentialing associates work to get them approved and paneled with insurance companies.

Therapists are invited to the platform immediately after signing. They are able to complete their tasks while our credentialing associates work to get them approved and paneled with insurance companies.

The UpLift platform guides therapists through creating their profile and adding availability, so they are more likely to attract new patients.

The UpLift platform guides therapists through creating their profile and adding availability, so they are more likely to attract new patients.

We built a kanban style board for our internal stakeholders—they could see who was where in the process and know exactly what remained for the provider to do.

We built a kanban style board for our internal stakeholders—they could see who was where in the process and know exactly what remained for the provider to do.

We built automated reminders.

We built automated reminders.

We migrated our external credentialing software to Verifiable and automated background checks, reducing manual processes by both admins and therapists.

We migrated our external credentialing software to Verifiable and automated background checks, reducing manual processes by both admins and therapists.

Results

The initiatives my team implemented decreased the time from when a provider signs their UpLift contract to when they are ready to see patients on the UpLift platform by 73% and increased the number of providers ever activated by 50%.

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