Medical Industry Credential System

Objective.

We are developing a credential solution for use by medical locums in Australia. Under the existing operating model, as part of any employment agreement or contract placement, a locum is required to provide numerous ID and credential documents to an employing hospital. Our solution directly interfaces with existing government digital ID systems and automatically embeds these documents into a PRISM DiD, which is then used in support all job applications made by the locum using our platform. This frees the locum from having to fulfil these legal and regulatory requirements manually and also provides enhanced assurance to the verifier. As part of our business, we aim to develop this more efficient operating model and deploy it for use by locums working in the 1300 public and private hospitals throughout Australia.

Expected Outcome

Our technical solution will automatically create digital IDs for locum users, and will automate the presentation of these credentials to hiring hospitals via our platform.

These government systems operate via permissioned access from authorised users and deliver the various pieces of documentation in XML. Therefore our software will operate as an authorised system user as an intermediary between the credential issuer and the verifier. The holder will be able to view and control access to the DiD from within our app.

The system automatically matches locum skillsets to jobs. By using PRISM as the credentialing service within our solution we intend to develop this service such that PRISM comes to form the de facto standard solution in this vertical in Australia.

We will also enable the holder to use the credential externally. Once the convenience of using the DiD becomes apparent, we will seek to develop the business and expand the use of our DiD solution beyond the medical industry, and we hope that our system users/credential holders will lead the way to widespread adoption of PRISM as leading DiD solution throughout Australia. 

Introduction and Overview

Sphere is an integrated job search and applicant tracking solution for use within the medical services industry, specifically the hiring of locums of all medical specialisations. Sphere was established in 2019 by Dr Paul Mousa, who is a general surgeon and has worked in hospitals throughout Australia.

This industry experience provides us with both practical knowledge of and personal connections with regulatory agencies, hospitals and medical locum hiring agencies.

Opportunity

There are a number of reasons why we believe that this industry is a prime candidate for the DiD revolution and why our system will provide a compelling and attractive solution to end users to drive its adoption.

The medical services industry is highly regulated. Employment is dependent on not only professional credentials but also other documentation, such as work history and law enforcement agency data etc. Various other documentation is involved such as timesheets for hours worked and payment records both for the hospital and tax reporting by the employee. Work schedules are irregular and hours are long. These administrative requirements are quite burdensome for doctors.  

The Australian government has an advanced digital ID infrastructure, making a technological solution wholly implementable, and yet the industry requires documents from a number of different agencies making it cumbersome and time consuming to use manually.

Thus the DiDs provided within our system will include government ID, plus these other professional credentials and other relevant documentation and will be generated and automatically updated seamlessly.

The current operation of the hiring process is also highly inefficient. Hospitals advertise vacancies via a number of medical locum agencies. Medical practitioners sign up with one or more of these agencies. However there is no guarantee that any specifically qualified locum will be signed up with any specific agency seeking to hire someone with their specialisation.

Agencies supposedly verify the paperwork from each medical practitioner, but this system often operates at a lower level of integrity than regulations specify.

Proposed Solution

The proposed solution disintermediates existing agencies and creates a central marketplace to which all hospitals connect. The focus is on enabling all parties within the hiring process to operate more efficiently and more cheaply.

As part of the sign up process, each medical practitioner assigns Sphere the required legal permission to access their digital data from the relevant government agency. Our system then retrieves the relevant credential data and packages these into a DiD.

- Core platform functionality :

• the platform enables hospitals requiring staff to post vacancies and medical practitioners available for work to view these vacancies and share their availability: both parties will be able to view and post.

• the platform also connects to external platforms handling travel and accommodation, enabling the entire transaction to be handled as a whole; job advertising, candidate selection and confirmation, transport booking and accommodation booking and documentation/audit trail, all handled as part of the platform transaction workflow. This will appeal to medical practitioners and provide incentive to sign up to the platform.

• the platform provides some computer aided intelligent matching of parties based on their respective requirements and availability, suitability etc. and will initiate push notifications of opportunities to relevant candidates. The team has extensive experience in using Machine Learning and will use that expertise here to create optimised job proposals.

An audit trail is created which will store

- all offers posted by any hospitals

- all interactions timestamped and recorded.

- confirmation of offers and acceptances

- contracts and invoices

- records of all accommodation and travel bookings (assuming these are tax deductible)

Budget

We are applying for $25,000. 

We estimate 2 x developers @ $35 per hour

2 x months @ 320 hours per month

Total 640 hours

= $22,400. 

This is an estimate and any other funds left over once we have completed the core technology will be spent on  marketing in order to develop the relationships with the hospitals to provide pull through demand from users of locum services in order to provide the most attractive platform to encourage locums to sign up. 

Summary

We believe that our in depth industry knowledge based on the practical experiences of our founder and our ability to market to other practitioners by appealing to shared experience will lead to our solution becoming widely adopted.

Additionally, while Australia is a relatively small sub sector of the market, the government is fairly advanced in its implementation of centralised digital ID based services and has well defined and accessible protocols for handling credential information.

The technology for accessing these services, once built, will be extended to other use cases. And once we become a trusted issuer of digital IDs and the use proliferates we will provide our DiD app more widely.      

About Sphere

Sphere is a team of three professionals with varied experience across medicine, software development and business.

Paul Mousa is a has worked as a general surgeon for 9 years and as a locum since 2017. Paul's practical experiences working as a locum are the impetus which led to him founding Sphere in 2019.

Iain Bell is a software professional with 25+ years of software development and is experienced in leading teams building enterprise solutions across a range of fields, including financial markets using machine learning (Genetic Programming) and property development, town planning using machine learning optimisations and 3D modelling.  

Tim Graham is an entrepreneur with varied experience of creating and managing businesses and is responsible for development of the business; signing up hospitals to the platform and relationship management with other external parties.