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Credentialing

Why credentialing takes 120 days — and how practices lose revenue waiting

Panel enrollment delays are predictable. A timeline, the four documents that cause most rework, and how to bill for care delivered during the gap.

· 6 min read

120 days is the plan, not the worst case

Commercial payers routinely take 90 to 150 days from a clean application to an effective date. Medicare and Medicaid have their own queues. A practice that starts credentialing when the clinician starts has already lost a quarter of revenue.

Start enrollment 120 days before the intended start date and the gap disappears. Everything else is damage control.

Four documents cause most of the rework

An unattested or stale CAQH profile, a lapsed malpractice certificate, an unexplained gap in work history, and a missing state license verification account for the majority of applications sent back.

None of these are hard to produce. They are hard to produce quickly once an application is already pending, which is why we collect them before anything is submitted.

Protect revenue during the gap

Some payers backdate an effective date to the application receipt, some allow supervised or incident-to billing, and some allow nothing. Knowing which is which before the clinician starts determines whether that care is billable at all.

We hold claims that can be retroactively paid and route the rest through an approved pathway, so the credentialing wait does not become permanently written-off revenue.

Re-credentialing is where established practices quietly lose panels

Revalidation notices go to whichever address or portal was listed years ago. A missed deadline can terminate a contract that took months to obtain.

A maintained roster with attestation and revalidation dates turns that risk into a calendar item.

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