How It Works — Northern Lights Medical

Onboarding

The path to your first placement.

National benchmark for recruiting one experienced RN: 83 days (NSI national report, 2025). Our onboarding is measured in days because the clinicians already exist, already place lines daily, and arrive with their credentialing file complete.

1

Fit call — 30 minutes

Your line volume, current coverage model, and pain points against our model and reference terms. We will tell you honestly if the math doesn't favor us — at high in-house volume, sometimes it doesn't.

2

Credentialing packet — ready day one

We maintain a complete, current file for every clinician: license verification, exclusion screening (OIG/SAM), background check, immunization records, and HIPAA training attestation — packaged for your medical staff office or vendor-credentialing platform.

3

Site orientation & agreement

We review your facility's policies, documentation procedure, and escalation contacts; you review our insurance certificates and reference terms. One contract, per-procedure pricing, no minimums.

4

First placement

An assigned clinician — the same faces, visit after visit, not rotating contractors — places the first ordered line at the bedside with imaging confirmation before release. Your unit nurses receive a handoff on every placement.

5

Steady state

After go-live, managing us is a quarterly quality report and an annual credentialing refresh. One point of contact, one monthly invoice. That is the entire administrative footprint.

Order flow

How an order becomes a confirmed line.

1A provider orders the line. Your team contacts us through the channel we set up at onboarding — direct line to our clinicians, not a call center queue.

2We dispatch within the agreed response window. Response commitments are written into the service agreement — including after-hours, weekends, and holidays — so coverage is contractual, not aspirational.

3Bedside placement under full barrier precautions. Ultrasound-guided, with supplies we bring. The right line for the order — and if a midline serves the therapy better than a PICC, we say so before we place.

4Imaging confirmation before release. Tip position is confirmed before the line is released for use. No exceptions in over a decade.

5Documentation lands in your chart. Technique, attempts, catheter details, confirmation result, and any complications — recorded per your facility's charting procedure, built to stand up to chart audit and Joint Commission tracer review.

Division of labor

What we bring. What you provide.

Northern Lights brings

✓Credentialed inserters (clinicians, not rotating staff)
✓Insertion kits, catheters, and consumables
✓Ultrasound equipment
✓Imaging-confirmation workflow on every line
✓Complete documentation per placement
✓Quarterly quality reporting
✓Liability coverage (certificates at contracting)

Your facility provides

✓The order and the patient
✓Chart access per your documentation policy
✓Badge/access logistics at onboarding
✓A designated escalation contact

No capital equipment. No inventory. No FTEs. No training program to build or maintain.

The honest question

"You're a small company. What if your inserter is sick?"

Fair question — it deserves a real answer, not a brochure answer. Our clinicians cross-cover one another, backup protocols are defined in the service agreement, and our response commitments are written as contractual windows we can actually keep. What a small team buys you in exchange: your staff sees the same clinicians every time, the owners review every quarter's numbers personally, and the person who answers the phone can make a decision. Eleven years of continuous service without a coverage collapse is the track record behind that answer.

From first call to first confirmed line.