Hello all - yesterday we received the following request:
We have a customer who would like to sign up 200 doctors for UW CME accounts. Instead of having each doctor do that registration, is there a way we could get the details from the organization and create those accounts in bulk?
Has anyone received a request like this? How do you handle it? Is the ability to create even “shell accounts” (Name and Email) by proxy something that is of interest? I’m not sure if we want to go down this route, but thought I’d throw it out there…
In some ways this overlaps with our desire to be able to invite faculty to complete their Convey COI without them having to create a full Ethos account first. We could set up a shell account so the Convey invite can get sent out immediately. We’d still likely eventually want them to get their full account completed, but it speeds up the COI process.
We are going through this right now but with thousands of accounts. We have been talking to Ethos about an account importer which they have done for other places. There is a fixed fee for this capability as well as a quarterly support fee. It seems like you would need to have all of the required fields from your profile set up in order for the importer to work properly. It sounds like it would work similarly to the credit import feature where you would upload a CSV or file in a specific format with the information for the profiles.
Ethos created the custom user import for us. There was a fee associated with this. The way we make it work is we send our activity coordinators a spreadsheet to complete with the basic user information that we require to be entered into the LMS. Once they return it to us, we use that to fill their custom user import file. It works pretty well but not without its glitches. For example, if a physician is both a DO and a PhD, it only allows one type of credential to be entered on upload. Also, it does not let you know if a specific person already exists in the system. It simply shows you how many users were created. You could upload 100 people (the system recognizes if an email already exists), and all it says is “95 users created.” It doesn’t let you who or why they weren’t uploaded. Also, if a field doesn’t have the “exact” information, it just leaves that field empty on the user’s record. Overall, it has been very helpful to us.
Thank you for this information. We’ve been looking at options here, and had cecided to only import the first value when there are multiple values in a field – thinking we’d have an email that asks people to review their profiles once the
import is done.
My question is how do you deal with those people who were already in the system? Is a duplicate record created that you then have to merge?, and what strategies do you use to ID those who weren’t imported and not identified by the importer
itself? As Ariel mentioned, we are looking at add thousands as the institution has created relationships with multiple other hospitals/systems…
