title: A faculty group practice-driven credentialing and privileging infrastructure in a school of dental medicine.
abstract: Credentialing and assigning clinical privileges are well-established practices in institutions that need to verify a clinician's ability to provide direct patient care services. The credentialing process verifies a provider's credentials to practice his or her profession, while privileging authorizes the individual to perform enumerated procedures within a specific scope of practice. All clinical faculty members at Harvard School of Dental Medicine (HSDM) practice in the Faculty Group Practice (FGP). Because of the number of practitioners in the FGP, the organization instituted a more formal process of credentialing that verifies that practitioners are not only licensed to practice, but also are competent to provide direct patient care. In contrast to other dental schools that have established similar protocols, HSDM approached the process not from the academic side, but rather from the clinical practice side, explicitly taking into account whether the FGP could accommodate another practitioner when an academic department wished to appoint a new faculty member. In doing so, we had to be careful to reconcile our educational and research needs with those of the FGP. In this article, we describe how, within this framework, we established a credentialing and privileging program in which all full- and part-time faculty members, as well as advanced graduate students, were included.
authors.affiliation: Department of Oral Medicine, Infection, and Immunity, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Boston, MA 02115, USA. elsbeth_kalenderian@hsdm.harvard.edu
authors.forename: Elsbeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kalenderian
authors.forename: Bernard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Friedland
authors.forename: Robert R
authors.initials: RR
authors.lastname: White
authors.forename: Athanasios
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Zavras
authors.forename: John D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Da Silva
authors.forename: Peggy
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Timothé
authors.forename: German
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Gallucci
authors.forename: Bruce R
authors.initials: BR
authors.lastname: Donoff
mesh_terms: D000571:American Dental Association; D001900:Boston; D002983:Clinical Competence; D003406:Credentialing / Q000592:standards*; D005179:Faculty, Dental / Q000592:standards*; D006124:Group Practice, Dental / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D007591:Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations; D008504:Medical Staff Privileges / Q000592:standards*; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000379:methods*; D012575:Schools, Dental; D014481:United States