Welcome to the Community @jcasas! First, I love the specificity of your scenario. This would be a great use case for deeper consulting from a HubSpot coach. But, to keep it short and helpful, here’s what I’m thinking.
The medical device credentialing situation you describe is one of those use cases where HubSpot’s standard objects get you most of the way, but not all the way. Here’s how I’d think through each piece.
To start, with, no I wouldn’t use the Leads object here if you can help it. Leads are built for pre-qualifying prospects, basically answering “is this worth our sales team’s time.” Your question isn’t about qualification. It’s about a regulatory gate that exists independent of the sales process. Company Z is already a real account (a hospital), the physician is already a real contact, and VAC approval is a compliance record sitting alongside them, not a stage they pass through on the way to becoming a customer.
So I’d go straight to Companies, Contacts, and a custom object if you have that level of HubSpot. No detour through Leads.
The data model
Here’s the shape I’d build:
- Company = Company Z, the hospital or facility
- Contact = the physician
- Custom Object: VAC Approval = the join record between a specific physician and a specific facility
That custom object is the key piece. It would carry properties like approval status, approval date, expiration date if the VAC system has one, the VAC reference or case ID, and the approving committee. It associates to both the Contact (physician) and the Company (facility).
I’d also set up a second custom object for shelf inventory, one record per device unit, owned by the sales rep, with a status property for on shelf versus delivered. When a rep goes to log a delivery, a workflow (or custom code action if you’re on Enterprise) checks whether an Approved VAC Approval record exists for that physician and that facility before the transaction is allowed to complete.
Why a Status field on Company falls apart
This is the part that trips people up. A single Status field lives on the Company record, which means it can only hold one value for the whole account.
But approval isn’t facility level. It’s physician plus facility level. A hospital might have five physicians on staff where three are approved and two aren’t. One field can’t represent five different states at once.
You’d also lose the audit trail. Who approved it, when, under what VAC reference number, does it expire. A status field gives you none of that, and if you ever get audited (which, medical device, you will), you need to be able to query that history and keep it reportable, not buried in a notes field.
The custom object approach also gives you something a status field never could: a clean automation trigger. Your delivery workflow can check for the existence and status of an associated VAC Approval record in real time, right at the point of transaction, which is exactly the control you’re describing.
Hopefully that helps get the ideas started flowing!
