About HVC

HVC — Hospital Verified Competency — is a national registry and verification platform for non-hospital personnel who work inside healthcare procedural environments: medical-device sales representatives, clinical specialists, service engineers, distributor representatives. It closes a specific gap in U.S. healthcare credentialing: no standardized, third-party, exam-based assessment of operational competency existed for these roles until now.

What HVC verifies

For every certified individual, HVC publishes a real-time, single-record verification at the moment a hospital, surveyor, or vendor desk asks: is this person currently authorised, by whom, and for what?

The three-layer competency model

Healthcare procedural competency is three independent things. HVC keeps them separate because they are sourced, evidenced, and regulated separately.

Product Competency

Can this person safely handle this specific device? Owned by the manufacturer under FDA quality-system rules. Today: employer-attested. In HVC: reported by the certified Company under ISO/IEC 17065 verification.

Hospital Competency

Can this person safely operate in this procedural environment — sterile field, infection prevention, surgical workflow, communication and escalation? Owned (today) ambiguously by the hospital under CMS Conditions of Participation. In HVC: the native layer, tested by an independent agency under ISO/IEC 17024 across twelve domains, and issued as the REP Number™.

Access Competency

Is this person administratively cleared to be in the building — identity, background, drug screen, immunizations, HIPAA, BBP? Owned by the hospital's vendor credentialing organisation under ANSI/NEMA SC 1-2020. HVC references this — does not duplicate it.

A hospital query against HVC sees the REP Number™ status and its current sponsoring Company Number™ status. Access status remains with the VCO.

The Cascade Principle

When a sponsoring Company's certification status changes — Suspended, Withdrawn, or Revoked — every REP Number™ linked to that Company is flagged in real time, on every query. The individual's own certification is not automatically affected, but the visibility of their current sponsorship changes immediately. This protects hospitals at the moment of OR access without revoking a person's portable Hospital Competency credential.

Who issues the credential

The REP Number™ is issued by HWASC under an ISO/IEC 17024 personnel-certification scheme. The Company Number™ is issued by HWASC under an ISO/IEC 17065 organisational-certification scheme. The certification body is independent of every sponsoring Company, and exam results travel directly from the testing provider to the registry without passing through, or being editable by, any employer.

What HVC is not

  • HVC is not a vendor credentialing organisation. We complement SC 1-2020 administrative-access verification, we do not replace it.
  • HVC is not an EHR or clinical record. Records here are certification records, not protected health information.
  • HVC is not a hiring decision. Status reflects the scheme's view of currency, not employability.

Scheme references

Public-facing summaries of the HWASC ISO/IEC 17024 and 17065 scope and scheme documents are linked from the For Hospitals & VCOs page. Where this overview and the HWASC scheme documents conflict, the HWASC scheme documents are normative.