National Shared Credentialing Program Launches with Major Payers on Board

What Is the National Shared Credentialing Program?

As of September 2026, CertifyOS launched the National Shared Credentialing Program, a platform that allows healthcare providers to submit credentialing data once and have it verified against NCQA and Medicaid standards for multiple participating payers simultaneously. UnitedHealthcare, Cigna Healthcare, and Centene have committed to the program, which is expected to begin processing credentials this fall and cover between 1.4 million and 2 million providers by next year.

• Who is participating: UnitedHealthcare, Cigna Healthcare, and Centene are the initial payer participants, with additional payers expected to join as the platform scales.
• What it replaces: The current process requires providers to submit separate credentialing applications to each payer, averaging 17 submissions per year at roughly $700 in time and expense per provider.
• Why it matters now: NCQA tightened verification windows to 120 days in July 2025, making duplicate credentialing cycles harder to manage and increasing the penalty for delays.

What Changed in September 2026

On September 23, 2026, CertifyOS announced the launch of its National Shared Credentialing Program. The program is backed by three of the largest commercial payers in the country: UnitedHealthcare, Cigna Healthcare, and Centene. According to the announcement, the platform is designed to eliminate duplicative credentialing submissions by letting providers enter their professional data once and have it verified against both NCQA and Medicaid standards for every participating payer at the same time.

Anshul Rathi, CEO of CertifyOS, stated that between 1.4 million and 2 million providers are expected to complete credentialing through the platform next year, with operations beginning this fall. The program aims to cut the roughly $2 billion the U.S. healthcare system spends annually on credentialing by up to 75 percent, according to CertifyOS estimates. For individual providers, the average cost of maintaining credentials across payers runs approximately $700 per year in direct expenses and lost time, spread across an average of 17 separate applications.

Mike Kane, senior vice president for provider data operations at UnitedHealthcare, said in the announcement that the model would help reduce unnecessary complexity and allow providers to focus on patient care. The program does not replace each payer’s individual network participation decisions. Payers still run their own contracting and enrollment processes. What changes is that the foundational data verification, the part that is identical across payers, happens once instead of being repeated for every single payer relationship.

Which Providers Does the Shared Credentialing Program Affect?

The National Shared Credentialing Program applies to any healthcare professional who needs to be credentialed with commercial payers participating in the platform. As of the September 2026 launch, that includes providers in UnitedHealthcare, Cigna Healthcare, and Centene networks. The scope covers physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, behavioral health clinicians, and allied health providers.

If your practice contracts with any of these three payers, your credentialing workflow will likely intersect with this program once it is fully operational. Practices that contract with all three stand to see the most immediate reduction in submission volume. In our experience working with providers across 40 states, the credentialing bottleneck is rarely a single payer. It is the cumulative burden of managing separate applications, each with its own portal, document requirements, and verification timeline, across every payer in a provider’s mix.

Solo practitioners and small group practices are likely to benefit the most from this shift. These are the providers who typically lack dedicated credentialing staff and absorb the administrative cost directly, either through their own time or through outsourced enrollment services. For a two-provider practice submitting to a dozen payers, the reduction from 17 annual applications to a single shared submission represents a meaningful operational change.

Why This Is Happening Now

Three forces converged to make shared credentialing viable in 2026. First, NCQA’s July 2025 standards update compressed primary source verification windows from 180 days to 120 days for accredited organizations and to 90 days for certified verification organizations. That tighter cycle means every duplicate credentialing submission now carries a higher risk of expiring before a payer processes it, which creates real urgency around reducing redundancy.

Second, CAQH’s rebrand to DataSpring in mid-2026 signaled a broader shift in how provider data infrastructure is being rebuilt. CAQH has historically served as the closest thing to a universal credentialing data repository, but it has never functioned as a shared verification platform. Payers pull data from CAQH and then run their own verification processes independently. The CertifyOS model goes a step further by centralizing the verification itself, not just the data collection.

Third, CMS’s proposed enrollment enforcement expansions in the CY 2027 Home Health PPS proposed rule, published July 6, 2026, are tightening the consequences of enrollment deficiencies across all provider types. When the regulatory environment makes enrollment errors more expensive, the business case for eliminating redundant credentialing submissions becomes harder to ignore.

How Much Does Credentialing Redundancy Actually Cost a Practice?

Credentialing redundancy costs providers approximately $700 per year in direct expenses and staff time, according to CertifyOS, spread across an average of 17 separate payer applications. That figure does not account for the opportunity cost of delayed enrollment, which is where the real financial impact compounds.

A provider who cannot bill a payer because credentialing is incomplete loses an estimated $42,500 per month in unbillable revenue, according to industry benchmarks. When duplicate submissions increase the chance that one payer’s verification cycle falls behind, the revenue exposure multiplies. A two-provider practice waiting on three delayed credentialing cycles could face over $125,000 in deferred revenue before the first claim goes through.

Across the credentialing engagements we manage at Contracting Providers, the most common source of delay is not a single difficult payer. It is the compounding effect of managing parallel submissions where one stalled application holds up the entire revenue cycle. A shared verification layer removes the most repetitive part of that process.

How Should Practices Prepare for Shared Credentialing?

The National Shared Credentialing Program is expected to begin processing credentials this fall. Providers do not need to take action today, but there are concrete steps that will position a practice to benefit from the program as soon as it is operational.

1. Audit your CAQH Provider Data Portal profile for completeness. The shared credentialing platform will verify data against NCQA standards. Incomplete profiles, expired documents, or lapsed attestations will flag the same way they do now, but across multiple payers at once. A clean profile is the foundation. If you need guidance on maintaining your CAQH profile, our CAQH guide covers the full process.
2. Confirm that your CAQH attestation is current. The 120-day re-attestation cycle has not changed. Payers that participate in shared credentialing will still pull from CAQH data, so a lapsed attestation will stall the process before it starts.
3. Reconcile your PECOS, NPPES, and payer records. Mismatches between your Medicare enrollment data and your commercial credentialing records are the single most common cause of application rejections we see. An address listed one way in PECOS and differently in CAQH will trigger a verification failure under any system.
4. Gather and centralize your current payer contracts. Know which payers you are credentialed with today, when each credential expires, and which payer portals hold your active enrollment. This inventory will help you identify which relationships will be covered by the shared program.
5. Identify gaps in your malpractice and license documentation. Expired malpractice certificates and licenses approaching renewal are the documents most likely to cause a credentialing delay. Under compressed NCQA timelines, a license that expires during a 120-day verification window can disqualify the entire application.
6. Review your employment history for unexplained gaps. NCQA standards require a written explanation for any employment gap exceeding 30 days. Providers who have changed practices or taken leave should have signed explanations on file before entering any credentialing process.

Common Misconceptions About Shared Credentialing

The announcement has already generated confusion in some credentialing circles. Here are the most important distinctions to understand.

Shared credentialing does not mean automatic network participation. A provider whose credentials are verified through the shared platform still needs to complete each payer’s individual contracting and enrollment process. Credentialing confirms qualifications. Contracting determines network status, reimbursement rates, and participation terms. These remain separate decisions made by each payer independently.

The program does not replace CAQH or the CAQH Provider Data Portal. CAQH remains the primary data repository where providers maintain their professional profiles. What the shared program changes is what happens after the data is collected. Instead of each payer independently verifying the same information, the shared platform handles verification once and distributes the results.

This is not a government mandate. The program is a private-sector initiative led by a health tech company with voluntary payer participation. Providers are not required to participate, and payers that have not signed on will continue to credential providers through their existing processes. However, if the program achieves the scale CertifyOS is projecting, providers who participate will see a measurable reduction in credentialing workload for those specific payers.

One question we hear from practice managers is whether shared credentialing changes how provider credentialing works at the operational level. The answer is that the underlying requirements have not changed. Providers still need the same documents, the same licenses, and the same attestation cycles. What changes is the delivery mechanism for getting those verified credentials to multiple payers.

In-House Credentialing vs. Outsourced Support

Even with a shared credentialing platform reducing payer-side duplication, the provider-side preparation work remains the same. A practice still needs to maintain a clean CAQH profile, keep licenses and malpractice coverage current, manage re-attestation cycles, and reconcile data across PECOS, NPPES, and each payer’s system. The shared platform simplifies the submission step, but the documentation and compliance work that feeds into that submission is unchanged.

For practices with a dedicated credentialing coordinator, this is manageable. For solo practitioners and small groups without credentialing staff, the preparation work is still the bottleneck. A provider who cannot keep their CAQH profile current will not benefit from a system that verifies CAQH data more efficiently. The data still has to be right before the platform can process it.

Providers often come to us after a credentialing delay has already cost them months of revenue. In our experience, the issue is almost never a lack of qualifications. It is a documentation gap, an expired document that was not caught, or a mismatch between systems that could have been fixed before submission. Whether credentialing moves to a shared platform or remains payer-by-payer, the preparation work is where the outcome is decided.

Frequently Asked Questions

Next Steps

Start with a credentialing audit. Review your CAQH profile, PECOS records, and active payer credentials to identify gaps before the shared platform becomes operational. If you need help understanding how CAQH credentialing fits into the broader enrollment process, our guides cover each step.

For providers managing credentialing, enrollment, and payer contracting across multiple states and payers, our team at Contracting Providers handles the full process. Explore our credentialing and enrollment services to see how we can keep your practice enrolled and billing without interruption.