| Common Questions |
The Practitioner Hospital Data Bank is the centralized database of hospital affiliation data providing instantaneous verification of practitioners' hospital affiliation. The PHDB alleviates your time from responding to affiliation letters by automating the process with a centralized website. |
A Participating Hospital is one that has joined the PHDB Network to provide consistent, quality, traceable, and instant Primary Source letters for other healthcare organizations to download for credentialing purposes.
Each Participating Hospital has full control over the content of their letter and their data in accordance with their by-laws and Policy & Procedure. |
| Yes. As long as these practitioners are or were in good standing, we encourage you to submit their information to PHDB to save you additional time. |
| We have a unique system that will automatically combines practitioners who have multiple dates on staff into one letter. As long as you export each unique affiliation for that provider, we can combine it onto one letter automatically for you. For more details on how this works, please call 800-995-4233 ext 206. |
| Yes. As stated in the January 2003 issue of JCAHO's Perspectives, "..hospitals are permitted to accept primary source data from an organization designated by the primary source as its agent in providing information to verify credentials." Our patent-pending processes were carefully designed to be in compliance with JCAHO and NCQA guidelines |
| Because each hospital controls their frequency of updates, there is no set schedule. However, each hospital should update the PHDB whenever there is a change in their medical staffs' status. WIN/Staff safeguards the information on our secured site with 24/7 monitoring and the strongest software security available today. Even though none of the information contains private sensitive content, we safeguard it with the very best technology and processes. |
| The PHDB does not store any Personal Health Information (PHI) as defined by HIPAA nor does it store any confidential information such as Date of Birth or SSN. However, as a safeguard, the PHDB website is protected in HIPAA compliance through 128-bit SSL data encryption. |
| Some hospitals like to have such releases, however, most every credentialing and re credentialing application that your practitioner signs, including yours, probably contains a Release and Acknowledgement Attestation signature page that already contains such language. Your practitioner has probably already authorized you to release and receive such information about his or her credentials for the purpose of evaluation of the application. Hospitals that still require a separate release are probably duplicating their work. Please check your practitioner application form to see if such language already exists. |
| PHDB is owned and operated by WIN/Staff, Inc., a privately-held California corporation (www.winstaff.com). We are not affiliated with any government agency, health plan, or hospital. We are a software technology company and since 1995, we've specialized in software for the credentialing industry, with a focus on web-based products and services. |
The data is strictly private and not sold or divulged to anyone that is not a qualified healthcare organization specifically for the purpose of verifying hospital affiliation. The only way affiliation data can be obtained from the PHDB is through our controlled software and tracking system. We purposely designed the database to NOT include practitioners' private information such as SSN, Date of Birth, addresses, or phone numbers.
The PHDB database servers are hosted in a highly secure facility here in San Diego. The facility has 24/7 security guards as well as redundant power and data systems. We specifically chose this facility because of their high availability of service and quality of their redundancy and backup systems. |
The standard rate is $40/month. This covers all of your maintenance costs for using our service to respond to affiliation requests AND covers all of your queries of other hospitals on the PHDB. There is no setup fee! There is no long term contact/commitment.
Please make sure to inquire about any special discounts for your state. |
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We will customize your letter at no charge |
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This form is required to be in compliance with JCAHO/AOA guidelines for Primary Source |
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Simply export an Excel file from your current credentialing system |
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The regular query fee is $3.00. Participating Hospitals on the subscription plan do not pay anything for queries. Some states also provide free queries to all hospitals regardless of participation. For state-specific discounts or additional information, please call us at 800-995-4233 ext 205.
Why do you charge for this information?
The PHDB provides an expedited service to help improve the communication between hospitals and other healthcare organizations. Along with a solid written Policy & Procedure, our service helps to reduce legal exposure for hospitals by providing quality, consistent, and traceable communication when responding to Affiliation requests.
When you factor in postage, return-postage, as well as the human-labor involved in fax/mailing requests and responses, the costs is well over $3. Ours service saves both the requesting entity and responding Hospital significant costs while also speeding up the credentialing process. However, we also want to make our service cost-feasible to Hospitals which those who participate and provide data to other hospitals also benefit from the discounted subscription plan. |
For a narrated demonstration that will explain everything about the PHDB and how to use it, please click here.
If you would like to schedule a conference call or have additional questions, please call us at
800-995-4233 ext 205. |
Click here
If you would like to schedule a conference call or have additional questions, please call us at
800-995-4233 ext 205. |
