Welcome. Welcome. Thank you. Just gonna give it a couple more seconds before we begin. Let everyone get into the meeting here. Thank you all for joining. Wonderful. Alright. We'll go ahead and get started. You are now viewing the scale and accuracy credentialing as a network performance lever webinar. So welcome. Welcome, everyone, and thank you again for joining. Today, before we begin, I just wanna share a few quick notes. So today's session will be recorded. So this will be recorded and shared post event. During the webinar, please submit your questions during via the q and a icon on your Zoom menu bar. You can submit questions at any time. Your questions may be answered live by one of our presenters or responded to directly in the q and a box. Here is a overflow, a high level agenda of what we will be discussing today. So you will hear speaker introductions. You will get, perspectives from NCQA and a program overview. You'll hear from Verifiable as they share their technology's role to drive scale and accuracy. There will be a moderated fireside chat with Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina and a future ready discussion that will also include verifiable. There will then be an audience q and a and closing remarks. So thank you again, and I will hand it over to Svetta. Thank you, Shakara. Hello, everyone, and welcome. I'm Sveta Bohimes, and I lead product management for evaluation programs at NCQA. Thank you for joining us today. I also want to thank Verifiable and Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina for partnering on today's session. I know you're all here because you care about this topic, and I want to start by centering on why this matters to patients and clinicians. We're all here to do a job. When credentialing works well, it supports timely provider onboarding and a smoother experience for clinicians. So patients, all of us really, can access care without delays and confusion. However, when it doesn't work, credentialing can become a bottleneck that affects access provider experience and cause significant burden. Today we'll explore how thoughtful credentialing practices and responsible technology enablement can support both compliance requirements and operational goals. From an NCQA perspective, we'll ground this in the outcomes effective credentialing programs are designed to deliver strong data integrity, clear and well documented decision making, audit readiness, and appropriate human oversight. Just a quick note, today you will hear from NCQA and from industry leaders about how credentialing operating models are evolving. There's a lot of change. I'm sure you have seen that yourself. Any technology examples are shared for discussion and learning. An organization should evaluate solutions based on their own policies, risk tolerance, and compliance needs. To elevate this conversation, I am so thrilled to welcome our panelists and introduce each one of them. We'll start with Brett Dewey, who is head of product at Verifiable, where he leads the development of AI powered solutions that simplify health care credentialing and monitoring. With a decade of enterprise software experience, Brett focuses on building products that improve compliance, data accuracy, and operational efficiency for health care organizations. Next, we have Janan Dave, who is senior vice president of operations at Verifiable and leads the company's NCQA certified credentialing verification organization. Since joining in twenty twenty two, she has she has helped scale Verifiable's operations, translate insights into audit ready solutions, and advance responsible AI innovation and credentialing. And we also have the pleasure of Danny Zajak, who is a principal strategic adviser at Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina, where he leads strategic alignment efforts across provider network operations. With deep experience in interoperability, value based reimbursement, and health information exchange, Danny helps organizations turn complex healthy challenges into practical, scalable solutions. Given this very rich industry expertise that we have in front of us, I really look forward to your questions at the end of the webinar. Before we hear from Brett and Janon, I want to ground us in what has recently changed in NCQA's credentialing program expectations. Because at the end of the day, these requirements, when NCQA developed those and and made them effective in July of twenty twenty five, they were to service patient access, clinician onboarding, and the trustworthiness of the information patients, clinicians, and organizations rely on. Across the program enhancements, NCQA has focused on updated verification timeframes, strengthened expectations for ongoing monitoring, and changes to information integrity, which keeps your data safe. What that means operationally is that organizations need a reliable way to demonstrate that required verifications are completed within the defined time frames. And here on this slide, just as a review, you can see how the time frames, have shifted. There's a lot less time available now because the focus now is on data, on having as fresh data as possible at time of making a credentialing decision decision. And having that data and having that verification done using traceable sources and clear documentation really helps avoid delays or gaps that can slow provider onboarding and create friction for clinicians and the team supporting them. We also made significant changes to ongoing monitoring. The updated expectations include reviewing specified information from NCQA approved sources at least every thirty calendar days for your entire network and reporting these findings, if there are any, to your credentialing committee or another, designated peer review body so that the organization can review and act on what's found in the best interest of the patients that you are serving. So as we shift into the technology discussion, the connection is straightforward. As expectations emphasize timeliness, repeatability, and information integrity, organizations need operating approaches that support consistent execution and produce the documentation and audit trail that makes oversight defensible while helping credentialing run-in a way that supports access and reduces avoidable burden. And with that, I am very pleased to welcome Janan and Brad who will tell us more about Verifiable's approach. Thank you so much, Swetha. Hi, everyone. I am Janon Devay. I'm the SVP of operations here at Verifiable overseeing our in house NCQA certified CVO. And every day, my team is credentialing hundreds of providers across a multitude of different kinds of health care organizations using the Verifiable's own credentialing and monitoring software. And I personally understand that there are key pressures that this audience knows all too well when it comes to credentialing and its impact on network performance. Challenges like network growth As plans absorb new volume regionally or across the country, they acquire new provider networks. The they amass immense backlogs that place great strain on credentialing teams. Challenges like provider experience. Credentialing is the provider's first impression of the health plan. And if that experience is slow, or disorganized or unclear, that impression suffers. Challenges like risk reduction. As we just heard from, know, standards are evolving throughout the year at the accrediting body level, but also at the state level, and credentialing teams are forced to stay on top of these regulations to mitigate risk. And last but certainly not least, I think one of the pressures we're all very familiar with in this moment is, operational efficiency. Those cost mandates are not going away, and there is great demand to do more with less. As health plans face these pressures, credentialing is often framed as a cost of doing business when, in reality, it's one of the most strategic levers a health plan has. Credentialing's impact on compliance is very When a provider's data is not verified or monitored, that is risk waiting to happen. Credentialing is also very clearly tied to quality. Obviously, the quality of providers in your network, ensuring your patient's safety, but also the quality of your provider data. Credentialing feeds the data downstream into your provider directory, and that data powers, across the organization. And in terms of access, if a provider is contracted and ready to see patients but still waiting to be credentialed, that is a direct impact on your members and their experience overall. For credentialing to become a true network performance lever, we have to confront the equation that's been broken for far too long. That equation has been volume equals headcount, quality equals added cost, and complexity equals added risk. That is not a sustainable model when margins are thin, regulatory standards are constantly evolving, and provider and member experience cannot be compromised. The best way to actually solve this equation is to fundamentally change and empower the way that teams are working. We have to rethink the way that credentialing actually gets done and enable credentialing specialists to really focus their time on the highest impact work. We want credentialing specialists to be able to spend as much time as possible on the twenty to thirty providers percent of providers in the network that may have some risk or some kind of concern that needs to be evaluated versus the rework chasing providers for missing information or things like data entry. We wanna ensure that credentialing specialists are focused on where their expertise most is most important and has the highest impact. And that belief has really been fundamental here at Verifiable in all the decisions and innovations we've made alongside our product team, Brett's team here. Let me take a moment and kind of walk you through the path that we've taken so far to really try to solve this equation. First, Verifiable was built API first, and what that really means is that our software is talking directly to primary sources in real time. That choice has enabled us to plug in everywhere where primary source verification is needed, and that has made provider data in our platform systematized, auditable, and well maintained. Second, on top of that API foundation, we built a robust semi automated credentialing product, which provides configurability to meet customer specific policies, greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to credential a provider, and offers credentialing specialists more visibility and control into the provider data to drastically reduce human error as they credential. Third, now we're, powering a new way of working through CredAgent, which is a specialized AI agent that unlocks ten times productivity for our credentialing specialists by taking a one at a time provider credentialing process to a process of processing multiple providers at a time without compromising compliance or human oversight. And Brett will share much more about what this looks like in practice, but I do wanna note that CreditAgent has come directly out of the challenges that my team faces every day. This has been a great collaboration between our in house NCQA certified CBO and our product team to really analyze every step and exception workflow within a credentialing process and really analyze where AI offers the most value and what really needs to remain with human oversight and decision making. This approach, together has really been, at the core of how we've collaborated and innovated far. And with that, Brett Dewey, our head of product, is going to walk you through how an agentic AI solution like CredAgent is designed to transform credentialing moving forward. Thanks, Janon. And and, yeah, exactly as Janan said, what's changed in the world around us, of course, is the technology available to attack these problems in a different way than has historically been done. And even for us, where we've started as an API first approach and we've automated the workflow, there are still now new opportunities to see totally, order of magnitude increases in productivity by applying the latest, agentic AI technologies to this problem. So that's exactly what we've done with CreditAgent over the last year is develop and launch a a new way to think about how credentialing gets done by leveraging the best aspects of this new technology to augment our own teams and your teams alongside credentialing as a process that needs to get completed. Really, what that looks like is instead of a single automated workflow that a single person can do one at a time, we can now process thousands of tasks in parallel because the AgenTik AI system can be treated almost like a human in terms of its ability to reason through different steps of the workflow. As you all experience day to day if you're in this role, there's always nuance. There's always a lot of, decision points that have to be attacked within even a simple linear credentialing workflow or what on the outside might look like a simple linear workflow. And that's the reason that even automation that, you know, kinda tackles the workflow one step at a time historically still requires a lot of hands on human involvement because there are a lot of decision points and a lot of nuance that have to be decided what to do in certain scenarios. But, again, this new technology allows us to, understand that, encode that, and allow the the system to progress those decisions on behalf of the human, and then only raise those up to the human as they need to be reviewed and validated. So that's really how CreditAgent works, and that's how we see such dramatic increases in productivity is we can scale across as though your team has scaled without actually adding, additional humans to the process, but allowing those those folks to handle more, in their day to day. So some of the key benefits of CreditAgent, it can handle those configurable rules. It can allow you to scale across, and it's still auditable just the way, the process would be today. So we built it with auditability and visibility and transparency in mind in the way that is designed. And then on the next slide, as Janam was just going to, I just wanted to illustrate kinda what we mean when we say you can scale across and scale across many thousands of tasks because that may not be obvious to to how that actually happens or what's different about today versus when we do that. So this is an illustration of, actually, someone from Janon's team. We took ten random providers from their their daily workload, and we said we're gonna have you do a time study of your own work. You know, go through the process for these ten providers, start the clock, and stop the clock as you finish the process. You can see on provider number nine, in this particular case, we were missing some information as soon as they got in there. So that one, you know, went straight to request additional information. You probably are all familiar with that, and that tends to extend the process and and fork out to a different set. But we had nine clean provider files that could be worked all the way through. Our team is extremely efficient. Janon's team, I take pride on her behalf in how efficient they are. And, you know, that's enabled by the technology that that Verifiable has built over the years. So you can see on average, you know, we're talking maybe eight, nine minutes, or seven minutes or six minutes, I should give them credit, for the total process here per provider. And it kinda walks through waterfall one by one. And over the course of about an hour, they made it through, you know, ten providers, nine of whom were completed. In tomorrow's landscape, when we apply CreditAgent to that same problem, right, ten providers have come in that need to be credentialed, it's like there's ten people to start the process. Right? We scale the processing power and the computing power, and we kick all of them off automatically on behalf of the credentialing specialist. And so it can get through those same processes, in parallel all at once. And the total time to kinda get all ten to the next phase is under ten minutes. Right? So that's where we get massive productivity increases. A lot of providers are going to do their intake applications, their, you know, forms that they send in off hours. It could be in the evenings. It could be on the weekends. And that's gonna sit there in a queue until someone comes in the next morning or on a Monday and picks that up, and then they're already behind. So CreditAgent is operating twenty four seven, and it's moving those down the pipeline of the workflow as far as it can get them. And then it's only gonna raise its hand for a human review when it has something that actually needs to be looked at. Whether that be during the data review process, whether that be based on a verification result that comes back with some level of concern, or whether that be, hey. Review the packet and make sure that everything that's been done, has been completed correctly, and it's ready for, you know, an actual human approval committee because we won't take that part out. So just wanted to give an illustration, as we walk into the next section here of what it actually looks like in practice for this to happen. It's a lot of a lot more automated initiation and a lot more processing happening on behalf of your team so that you can scale how much work you can do without having to add team members to do it. And with that, we're actually gonna move into the conversation portion of today's webinar. So I'm gonna hand it back to Sveta to take us into more of the q and a. Wonderful. Thank you, Janan and Brett. I know there will be a lot of questions, a lot of curiosity about how technology is evolving the work, that you just, talked about. So but before we dive into that, we would love to hear from Blue Cross Blue Shield, North Carolina because they have real world view from a health plan perspective. And I Danny, thank you for joining us. We're excited you're here. And to start, I'd love to hear you introduce yourself and share a little more about your role at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. Sure. Thank you so much. Great job, from the verifiable team. My name is Danny Zajak. I'm representing our provider network operations and strategy team. I'm genuinely appreciative of the opportunity to have this conversation with you and and have the audience hear our our perspective. I currently lead an initiative where we are modernizing and transforming how we onboard, manage, and maintain provider data, and we are focused on enhancing the provider journey and accelerating our internal operations. Sounds like a a common theme that we're talking about today. In partnering with with Verifiable, we're looking for an integrated credentialing solution, and that's really at the center of how we've we've structured our pending implementation model that we'll cover in more detail today. Wonderful. And so, clearly, you have the big picture. You hold the big picture at at your organization. And, how would you let's let's zero in on credentialing. How would how would you describe the scope of transformation you've been driving, and where credentialing fits inside the bigger picture of what it means for Blue Cross Blue Shields of North Carolina's patient members and, and clinicians? Yeah. We we've had to take a hard look at ourselves and and especially relative to what other payers are are doing in this space and where the where the market is going. So our our initiative, it it targets provider enrollment, credentialing, contracting, and ongoing data maintenance. And moving forward, this now happens, they will all those areas will operate cohesively and efficient more efficiently in one system. And we're zeroing in on from the credentialing perspective end to end visibility, increased automation, and decreased manual entry. So we really needed a a a modernized credentialing solution that could complement the overhaul we're doing with enrollment and and contracting, while improving the transparency and accelerating that that end to end process for our provider partners. And I imagine a lot of payers who are on this webinar may have heard you and say, oh, wow. Yes. That's that's what we're experiencing too. Can you take take us back to when you started this work and when you looked at how credentialing was running, like, on the ground, what signals told you that the status quo wouldn't scale or compliance was at risk, or you just felt like the organization felt that that there's a time to move on. Sure. Yeah. The the way I look at it, you'll get primary source verification, ongoing monitoring for the most part. I think we could all agree, like, credentialing is credentialing or, like, at least it it should should be. So I wouldn't say anything was necessarily wrong, with our current state status quo other than the fact that it was our our status quo. We we were not agile enough to continue to adapt, improve, accelerate, and we've really wanted the credentialing experience to be as seamless as possible for our providers, while fully maintaining our regulatory integrity. So approaching credentialing with provider experience at the forefront and then a back end rooted in in strong data architecture, we really wanted to be positioned to to meet compliance standards, be more adaptable to adjust any new items that we may need to down the road. The final thing I'd say there in terms of, like, the signals that that informed our logic behind why we needed this change, it really boiled down to the lack of speed we have currently if we ever need to adapt quick you know, in a in a quick manner. We want to be able to be very responsive, moving forward on that front. Great. And how did you look at to reimagine the process? And and, you know, technology obviously is always the first thing people think of, but also the thing that they sometimes resist. So how how how did you and your team think about how technology could play a key role in in meeting your objectives? Yeah. One one of the first questions we asked ourselves was how we can reimagine the the way that we work. So for us, that meant the first thing that that's changing is team member mindset and skill set, so people. Both of those had had to evolve and also be, positioned, and then be open to adapt to an ever changing environment. Once that was kinda level set amongst the team, we asked how can we supplement it with improved processes, and then what technology is available to support the desire to responsibly accelerate any components within that credentialing life cycle. So, really, what it boiled down to, we felt our solution needed to provide actionable measurable actionable, actionable measurement and insight into each area of the provider journey. I look at it as, like, portal to to payment, And that way, we can, leverage the technology to meet the provider where they are and then also have the ability to meet our various internal targets and KPIs and SLAs while also analyzing, refining, and implementing new processes wherever we feel they are necessary. I I really love that you brought up the people first lens to this conversation, and and I hope that's something others can think through and apply because change happens, right, when when everybody's on board. And speaking of that, so there's your team, right, thinking and innovating. How how did you build the internal case across the organization, and and what were the nonnegotiables in in doing that internal case? Because you have to bring everybody along, not just the team that will be implementing. Yeah. It's a really good question. The the business case is always, like, challenging and and pretty unique to at least at at the point in time where the enterprise wants to focus. Not that the emphasis wasn't there before on this front, but our team did have historical challenges in in this area. And, really, the the the champion, the messaging that we were spreading across the organization is we determined, you know, our front door for our providers needed to be improved, especially if we wanted to be successful in any other provider partnership endeavors down the road. So the primary nonnegotiable and the the slogan for this project, people on my team are sick of it. The current state is not the model for our future state. And we just said that over and over and over again because people are so used to doing what they've always done. And, when you start to ask the the why question behind it, sometimes there's not a very good answer to to the why. So we decided we have to think collectively as an enterprise in a cohesive manner, and we structured our business case to to question the why, to be fact driven and value focused. And, really, what that ultimately boils down to for me is just an improved provider or user experience both on the provider and the internal team member front and visibility throughout the process. It's something that we had a gap on and and we wanted to improve. I I jotted down your your slogan because I think that could be applied to pretty much anything we do. So, I I may I may use that. Sure. Copyright. And so and, you know, thinking through your process, what has been key in preparing provider data and managing change for this project? Because I imagine you had a legacy system. You're introducing something new. Information has to migrate. Can you take us, through through that change, data change management? Yeah. First things first, this has not not been easy. This is a true true challenge. We we as you mentioned, we currently operate out of a lot of systems. There are many systems in the mix, so we had to be really intentional in our effort to reduce data fragmentation as as much as as much as we could. We also had to be realistic. I think we realized there's a pretty good chance, like, managing change at this scale, like, would come with lessons learned. I'm not gonna act like we were perfect throughout this process, but we apply those lessons, you know, moving forward, to to anything else that that we want to develop. But building off of what I mentioned earlier and something you you commented on, we've really had to blend people, process, and technology first across all the the disciplines in our organization that are impacted by this by this initiative. And, really, once the once the vision was was clear and prioritization and engagement were were level set, ultimately, what it what we had to do is just start chipping away. And and we've had to follow our our documentation, our decision documentation processes and make sure everyone's informed because this change at this scale is hard to track continuously. So it's just sticking to our standards, but really boiled down to just chipping away at, at one system after the next. And where would you say you're in in the transfer, transformation journey? Like, what, is there a name to the stage you're in? Norming, performing, monitoring? Yeah. We're we're really we're we're we're tracking to be in the new product by by the end of the year. So, we're kind of on the tail end of the development phase, and kicking off a lot of the there's always continuous testing throughout it, but starting to kick off some of the business acceptance testing, which is really important. We wanna make sure the users, that will be in the in the tool have familiarity and have a long enough runway from a business ready readiness perspective to be comfortable for when the when the transition takes place. And while this is still, it hasn't launched yet, and there's, time, a little bit of time before you see the real results. But at a high level, what what are you anticipating, or what were what are some of the short and long term goals you had? If everything were to go according to plan, how do you envision this will transform credentialing at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina? Yep. In the short term, as we increase automation, we reduce manual entry, and we also reduce the amount of rework tied to manual entry at HIE's. So what that does for us, at least from our targeting perspective, it extends to time savings both internally and externally. So we really expect this to significantly accelerate our end to end onboarding time immediate like, immediately. And verifiable plays a key role in that. You saw some of their statistics there. As you as you stretch that concept out from a, like, a road map perspective, we want to continue to learn how we can work more efficiently. So that for us, that acts on enhanced measurement and feedback loop functionalities, our relationship with with NCQA verifiable what you are seeing in the market, and then just continue to look for different areas where we can strengthen our onboarding and our our maintenance experience for our providers. Great. Well, maybe we'll have an opportunity to check-in with you, once everything is in place and you've had the chance to see, how how things work post launch. Yeah. That sounds great. Thank you. And and with that, I I would love to welcome, open up the chat with verify with the verifiable team with Brett and Janon. You heard earlier from them, there's a lot of exciting movement in credentialing that has been gaining speed in the last four to five years. It things are changing, period. And there's a lot of uncertainty about what's what will happen, how will how will it work out, at what point should I join this movement. Right? And I I'm wondering from each of your perspectives, what do you feel are nonnegotiables for accountability in in any model moving forward? Because at the end of the day, and I said that in the in the beginning, this is about patient safety. The data is very dynamic, and we want to move faster, but not at the expense of risk. Right? And so tell us about the nonnegotiables for accountability that you see are are pretty critical here. Great question, and I can I can kick us off here? I think that, obviously, technology within this space has been present for many years. I think we're witnessing an acceleration, obviously, in this last year. And so there while there are new things to be aware of and think about, a lot of the nonnegotiables for accountability in in the way we think about operational models and technology models, I think, remain remain somewhat the same. So I think some of the things that we have always wanted to consider, I think, as an operations leader, overseeing a credentialing team, but something we guide our customers as as they are setting up the software as well and managing this in house too is, from the first aspect, it is kind of defining your defining your path end to end and defining escalation paths, understanding, you know, obviously, even when there's automation or without understanding what is going to happen if that breaks or if you don't have everything you need. Your teams will need to understand how to manage those exceptions and what's going to happen as a result. Kind of hand in hand in with that, I think a nonnegotiable, especially moving towards a more technology forward approach is understanding and defining ways to control and manage process changes. So sometimes what can be challenging with technology is that, obviously, it enables us to move quickly when set up, but sometimes there can be challenge in actually implementing change. Sometimes it doesn't feel as fast as telling your team, hey. We have a process change that we need to action on right away. And so, really, I think, upfront, being able to define those escalation paths and defining ways to manage future process change is really critical. Something else I'll mention is, of course, with technology forward approaches, really understanding and having visibility into every step. So clear audit trails at every step. Obviously, that's something that's always top of mind with NCQA standards. But I think especially in this new world, being able to understand where and how decisions are being made is really critical and kind of hand in hand with that, still validating that you have a human sign off and human oversight at the most critical points of decision making through credentialing, but also steps beyond credentialing, of course. And I think something that's really important, what if you are working with a CVO, but also potentially if you're just considering a software solution, is a really robust kind of defined agreement on on responsibility. So from a CVO standpoint, this is a delegation agreement and ensuring that that is quite detailed, and it's very clear which parties are owning what. But I think, you know, even as we look at software solutions, having that level of granularity as to, you know, what's being managed and owned from a software perspective and where your teams are you know, will still need to intervene or own certain aspects of the the process will be really important. And Danny oh, Brett, please join. Oh, yeah. Sure. I was just gonna add a little bit more from, the technology development perspective that we took, especially as we develop CreditAgent. One of the things Danny said that, you know, definitely resonated with me is with his team thinking about sort of the human element. Right? The way we work today is not the target for how we work in the future. We have to do the same thing with the technology we build in our own mindsets. Right? Because as we have new opportunities to attack a problem, we wanna rethink it kind of from the ground up. And then only after we've rethought it, think, okay. And then what are the constraints that might affect that? So this question is really about, like, what are those constraints that we still wanna apply? Right? What are the sort of the nonnegotiable things that we still have to make sure are there? And, you know, I think Janan really alluded to several of them that apply not just to sort of the process, but also to the product or to the technology. So where does a human have to be involved still? You know, we're we are automating more, obviously. But as we do that, how and when are we involving a human for sign off? And and the how is really important there too. So a lot of what we've developed, with CreditAgent is a new sort of design pattern for how we bring the information that is relevant in the most efficient manner and the most compact way to that specialist to let them do the same job faster, better, more efficiently, but with the same or better results. Right? If today, you have to look at three different documents on three different tabs and scroll through twenty different pages, and tomorrow, we can bring all that information into a single view, You know, tomorrow's state is faster and better than today's state. So those are, like, kind of the micro decisions, I'd say, that go into designing something that still holds that same level of accountability and that still delivers that same outcome, yeah, as good or better than today's state. I I do wanna highlight what Brett said. Humans are needed, especially in in credentialing. The the accountability sits with the organization, and I'm bringing in my I'm putting on my NCQA hat here because I have to. You know? And then the reminder is, yes, NCQA is looking at this in terms of where's the human involved. The accountability is with the organization that is saying, I am entrusted to do this job of primary source verification, and this is correct. And and from the health plan perspective, they're highly regulated, right, to make sure that members only have access to providers that are, appropriately credentialed. So it's a it's a very heavy responsibility across the board, and and humans will continue to be the ones accountable for for those final decisions. I think that sometimes gets lost. I think we get very excited, and and that's a question that we get a lot, at least at at NCQA. And, Danny, I I don't know if they were, from your team and from the payer perspective when when you're looking at risk mitigation, you know, what were the nonnegotiables on on your end? Yeah. I think, really, what it the way I look at it is what I spoke about earlier, and Janon made a good point. I look at user experience and full transparency and visibility into the process. So Janon called it out from the auditing perspective, making sure we were tracking all all along all throughout the process, but I I'm also looking at it from our relationship with with our providers and and our team members. I think it needs to be simple. I like to think of and internally, we call it the Domino's pizza tracker. Every step of the way, we should know we should know where we are. I believe every appropriate stakeholder should have every insight into where their situation stands ready readily available to them, to the point where they they don't need to ask. They can feel empowered. But if they do need assistance, whoever's on the other end, that first person answering that phone or responding should should be fully positioned for for that to feel seamless. I think the last thing I'd say real quick, maybe a little off topic, but I always think of, like, my my daily life experience, and maybe you guys can relate airport car rental. You know, you you fill out you sign up for your car. You fill out everything. You pay. You get your confirmation six months later. You get off the plane. Of course, probably delayed, and you make your way, and there's a line of twenty people. You get through the line. The person looks at you, and they're like, how can I help you? And it's almost as if they're shocked that you're there to rent a car. And that kinda feels like a lot of what health care is is like, and we we can't have have that anymore. We need to be able to leverage data that's being entered by these providers, to to the fullest capacity. I I want to get off the airplane. I want the car rental place to know that my flight was delayed. I want the right car that I ordered six months ago to be, like, available. I think the same concept applies here. We want to empower our providers, but also meet them, to make it as seamless as possible. That analogy is so vivid for me because this happened to me last week. Literally exactly what you described. And, yes, I I was, I drove a big truck. So they only had big trucks left, and that's what I drove. And I felt actually very good about it. Yeah. But you're right that that it was a surprise, and no one should be surprised in in this event Yes. Here with credentialing. Janan and and Brett, you talked about audit ready, and that's very critical still. Regulators, even outside of NCQA, everybody wants to be audit ready. What what does that mean, though, in an automated future, especially with AI? How can you make a visual for us and explain what organizations should be looking for when when they say audit ready and AI in the same sentence? Yeah. I can I can start on that one? And, again, for me, I I kinda look at things through the technology and product development lens because we have to ask these questions all day as we build the thing. And we've iterated a ton as we think about applying AI to these processes on how do you explain what AI has done or what technology or automation has done as it goes through that process. And how do you explain that in a way that is useful to that human overseer, to that specialist, that's not overbearing and overburdening where they're just gonna ignore it? Because we all know that that's a potential. As humans, we could get in a zone where we just never read anything because there's too much to read. I don't know the last time I signed up for, like, a privacy policy on a website, but I couldn't tell you what it said. I just checked the box. Right? So we don't want that, but we we do wanna give information where it's pertinent. Like, this is what was reviewed. This is what was found. And if it was found and a human needs to then look at it, you know, how do we raise that up to their attention? So I think that's really important when we talk about audit ready for technology and AI systems is, what what decisions are being raised up and how are those decisions decided to be raised up to the human for their review. So that's a key part of the, again, the design that we've sort of put in place. And then that, to your earlier points about this, sort of, like, really reinforces the accountability is on that human. Right? So we want the people who are doing the job to remember and to know at all times that that decision, that final decision, you know, lies with you and relies on you. And so, I think those two things together to me are how the technology sort of complements what we mean when we say audit ready in the future. Great. Yeah. Go ahead, Jenna. I was just gonna build on that from Brett. I think I think, you know, as we insert more technology into this process, there is kind of this potential risk with a diffused accountability, a little bit of, like, I didn't take this step. The software ran this step. And I think, you know, with our team, we are certainly emphasizing that each packet that, you know, they work on or each provider credentialing that they work on, like, they are accountable for that for that provider's journey. And so what's been really, I think, really interesting for us is, you know, in a lot of the testing that we've done with the development of CreditAgent, we have actually worked with Brett's team and kind of gone back and forth to his point on you know, I think initially to provide more efficiency, there was less data less explanation that the agent was providing of, you know, what what decisions is it making, what elements of the credentialing application did it review and find gaps on. But I think that that accountability mindset, luckily, I think in the credentialing industry is quite ingrained. And so, you know, it was the credentialing specialists themselves that were requesting more more visibility into exactly, you know, what data sources have been looked at, what information has been vetted. And so I do think, you know, it is kind of that combination of providing logic and explanation. If you are leveraging technology, being able to have that visibility into the logic of, you know, what's being reviewed, but then still ensuring that your t our credentialing specialists, our humans are able to be the ones making the judgment and making decisions and documenting that, of course, ideally, with with a bit more efficiency with the information being provided to them. But, you know, I think all of this is around kind of ongoing preparation, whether it's with your software or with your teams. Preparing for these audits is not like a last minute scramble. It's something that has to be ingrained in your policies and and your overall operations day to day. Thank you all so much. At this point, we'll turn to the q and a. We have several questions in the chat. I will go, and and I'll and I will ask you. I think many of you will have different perspectives on this. We spoke about automation and advancement, but change management has to happen across the board internally with providers, with organizations. And we have a question. What are best practices to encourage providers to utilize online credentialing platforms versus submitting paper applications? Any advice here? I I can start. My my background's in health information exchange from from clinical clinical data. So I was entered the workforce right when electronic health records were starting to come to life, and one of my first roles, was as a a young twenty one year old trying to influence, these seasoned doctors to get off of paper and move to electronic health records. It wasn't it wasn't easy. I think it it depends. There's there's a lot of dependencies upon what standards are coming from, national agencies, and, also, there's there's state state level, you know, requirements as as well. But, really, you need to have, at least in my experience, you need to have a a champion that can influence, the area in which in which you're working, and you need open collaboration. So people that are hesitant to to react, they don't necessarily wanna jump on on the first ship to get across the ocean. They can see the the results and hear the results from from people in in the in the first person. The last thing I'd say there is we need to continue certainly in this space, which I think we've we've done a good job so far, but mirroring health information exchange. The tipping point did not happen until standards were were established and accountability were was placed on those standards. And that opened up the the floodgates because you you could start to actually see this data exchanging in a safe and secure manner and making it easier for the the provider to refer a patient and for a patient to show up to an encounter and their their doctor knowing why they're there and and made it a lot better. So I think part of it is just having having to trust the process, but also relying in on the buy in around the standards, that help make the system function as it should. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Danny. We have a question about measuring the the setup time for the system. Meaning, how long does it take you to get the information you need to be automated? And there are various experiences with software. Maybe this is something you can take broadly, but Brett and Janon, from your experience with organizations that you work with, are you able to comment on the approximate timing of migration of systems? Sort of. I can give a couple of, like, factors, right, that that matter in that equation. One is, you know, your established processes and just how established they are, if that makes sense. So if you have a clear understanding of the rules that you're following today outside of, of course, the standard NCQA, rules that we would come out of the box with as a a software offering or a CVO offering. That understanding and that level of sort of robustness of, hey. This is what we really need tends to make the process move more quickly if you're not doing discovery at the same time. I will caveat that with Danny's comment earlier again, which is you don't always wanna automate your current process. Right? You you often are doing a trans transformation or changing technologies because you actually wanna improve and change the way it's done today. And so that's where a company like Verifiable with our product comes with also a perspective on here's how we would suggest you implement and you do this. And so if you're also willing to sort of take best practices and gold standards from, you know, a vendor who you're trusting to partner with, that can also accelerate that time line. So it can be, you know, on the order of weeks to months to get data in place and configurations, in place. And then for larger organizations, sometimes that can extend because of often the change management required internally as much as the implementation itself. So those are those are some of the factors. Thank you, Brett. We have a question, from California, about nonlicensed individuals. They still have to meet certain requirements like education, work experience. Will this system, I I I suppose verifiable system, have the capability to verify that information without a licensing agency to ensure they meet compliance standards? I can jump in here, and, Bret, feel free as well. It's a great question. Our systems are set up to support credentialing for a very broad range of providers. And even prior to kind of this evolution with AI, we were credentialing and supporting credentialing for ancillary providers, behavioral health providers, dietitians, all kinds of providers regardless of sort of licensure status or not. We have integrations with education verification, bodies such as National Student Clearinghouse. We as well as, you know, other other means of credentialing and verifying this type of education, training, and and history. So there's already a lot of those capabilities baked in as we know that most are comprised by a multitude of types of providers. And and, also, just would add that you may have types that don't require credentialing at all, but that do require some sort of monitoring or verifications of those sources, and that's also a standard offering of our software in this case. Great. And this is not a question, but just a testament to the knowledge and power you've shared today. There are a number of question statements in the chat that, organizations are ex really inspired by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina's journey. Danny, you have a fan club now, and and everybody's excited to see how things go. So I think my impromptu invitation to come back early next year will have to become a reality. And a lot of questions on follow ups. There will be information in in the email that that NCQA will set will send out to everyone who is registered. So be on on the lookout for that in the next few days. And, we can move to closing to give you just a couple of minutes before your next meeting because I imagine you're all very busy and ready to jump to the next, task. So we would love to continue learning with you and by joining us at NCQA's Health Innovation Summit this fall. It will be in Atlanta, October fourth through the seventh. There's information there on on how to register or or what we have in mind for you. You can also visit our website for additional information on the standards. We have we are continuously offering education and webinars on this topic because we know it matters to a lot of you, all of you, as you're looking to strengthen your credentialing practice. And I think with that, we can close out. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your questions. There's, of course, the legal language at the end. The standards that we covered in the beginning are just a brief snap shot of what's in NCQA standards. If you're looking for the full, set of standards, please visit our website. And with that, I want to thank you for your time, and, we hope to see you soon.