From left: Art Trevethan, Shawn Frasquillo, Kylie Forbes and Jennifer McIntosh are building a service to simplify doctors’ professional lives through their San Marcos-based startup, ProCial.[/caption]Ask Art Trevethan, marketing director of San Marcos startup company ProCial, what anesthesiologists, psychologists, surgeons and other medical professionals have in common and he is quick to answer.
“They’re overworked,” he said, citing a 2014 American Medical Association study that found 81 percent of physicians describe themselves as “at capacity or overextended.”
Trevethan and the rest of the team behind ProCial, a company born out of the San Marcos-based physician practice management company Centrix Group, are hoping to ease medical professionals’ workload by reducing the amount of time they have to spend taking care of certifications, medical licenses, medical malpractice insurance and other pertinent documents.
Before medical professionals can begin practicing at a given facility, they must go through the process known as credentialing, which essentially ensures their licenses and other pertinent documents are up to date.
Garry McIntosh, director of practice management with the Centrix Group, estimated about 75 percent of his clients struggle with the credentialing process.
“Some of these doctors have documents that they put in a box in the attic, and they haven’t looked at it in a few years,” McIntosh said. “They haven’t really kept up with it. When they go to move or take a new position, digging up these documents can become quite a cumbersome feat.”
The company believes that if it can reduce the amount of time medical professionals spend working on credentials, it will translate to more face-to-face time with patients and improve overall health outcomes, Trevethan said.
Amber Cupples, credentialing specialist with the medical services company LifeLinc, said she has been using ProCial since April and is already seeing returns from it.
Procial created a database of medical professionals for LifeLinc and uploaded each doctor’s credentials to the database. Now, whenever Cupples needs to send documents to hospitals or other medical facilities, she simply copies the correct folder from the database and emails it, as opposed to the old process, which required sorting through paper folders to find the correct document, then manually scanning it and emailing it to the intended recipient.
“It simplifies my life and frees up a lot of time,” Cupples said. “If you’re getting in on the ground floor, they’re offering this service for free. That’s amazing. We had looked into credentialing housing—software to house our credential documents—and the quotes we got were ridiculous. Like $100,000 and up. This was a no-brainer.”
Trevethan said the service will be especially useful to “locums,” a term used to describe doctors who take assignments at facilities for short periods of time. Each time a locum moves to a new facility to begin practicing, he or she must be credentialed.
“Their pain is, ‘Every time I want to work I have to pull this [bundle] of paper out,’” he said. “‘I’ve got to deliver it. I’ve got to make copies before I can start earning my daily wage, before I can start making money and before I can start caring for the patients who need that specific type of specialty.’”
ProCial CEO Alexander Candelario said he decided to launch the service after a physician he worked with practiced medicine for two weeks without realizing his medical license had expired. That type of incident, which Candelario said is more common than one might think, is exactly what ProCial aims to prevent. He said that had there been an incident between a patient and that doctor during those two weeks, a medical malpractice suit would have likely ended in the patient’s favor because of the expired license.
Since launching Jan. 9, the service has attracted hudreds of thousands of doctors, nurses and medical professionals, Trevethan said. Candelario said the company is at a place it did not expect to be for many months.
The company has been self-funded until recently, when it began its first effort to secure venture capital.
“We find ourselves right now lucky because we think that we have a great idea,” he said. “But more important than that, we know we have the wind at our back, and we have the right team executing the idea.”
