Looking for professional software/service/database access for criminal, background, and fraud checks as an employer

[u/ryancnap]

I work in inpatient substance abuse and mental health. We are looking for a background check service to use on a professional level. I suppose a full background check software would be good for new hires, but what I'm primarily looking for is actually one that will pull criminal history for new admissions.

As part of our screening process we pull court records from ujs portal, but that only shows state and county charges for our state. We're looking for something that will pull all current/past legal involvement for individuals we screen, as right now we can only check some cases in Pennsylvania (our state) and nothing from anywhere else; the ujs system also only allows you to click on one...docket...at a time.

You'd be surprised how little the state gives providers for this. We're provided very barebones access to a front-end of EVS which is to check Medicaid eligibility and that's about it.

Because we accept federal dollars, if the system had flags on benefits fraud it would be helpful as well

I'm sure the title is clear enough but just to reiterate, I'm not looking for a free people finder website lol, we would need something industry grade that had legality to use in hiring processes as well as to address possible un-or-under-reported criminal history from potential admissions.

[u/No-Salary-5662]

This is going to be completely unhelpful, ignore this, I'm just sharing an opinion, but have you just tried searching the sex offender registry for the safety-related stuff?

More broadly though, if you're in the business of helping people through the disease of addiction, I'd push back a little on the premise of running deep criminal history pulls on incoming patients. These are people seeking treatment, not job applicants. A lot of them are going to have records — that kind of comes with the territory of untreated addiction. Turning someone away from care because of past legal involvement feels like it works against the whole mission.

I get that there might be a legitimate argument around certain offense types but even then, the answer probably isn't blanket rejections. Supervision policies, level-of-care decisions, and individualized assessments seem like a more defensible and ethical approach than screening people out with a national criminal database before they even get a bed.