Start credentialing before you sign a lease.
The most common expensive mistake in opening a practice: signing a lease, building out, hiring staff, and then discovering that you cannot bill your largest payer for another four months.
Credentialing takes 90 to 150 days per payer, sometimes longer. It is the one thing that cannot be accelerated by working harder, and it is almost always started too late.
What it actually involves.
- Before you can apply
- NPI, EIN, state license, malpractice coverage, CAQH profile, and a practice address. Several of these have their own lead times, and the address requirement is why credentialing and space decisions are entangled.
- The application
- each payer separately, each with its own forms, portal, and requirements. Medicare and Medicaid are their own processes on their own timelines.
- The wait
- 90 to 150 days is typical. Some payers are faster. Some are considerably slower, and a single missing document restarts the clock without anyone telling you.
- Effective dates
- frequently not retroactive. Services provided before your effective date may be entirely unbillable — not delayed, unbillable.
What goes wrong
- A stale CAQH profile
- attestation lapses, applications silently stall, and nobody notifies you.
- Applying too early
- some payers require a practice address and will reject an application without one. Others will not.
- Missing the effective date
- seeing patients before enrollment completes, and writing off the revenue.
- Losing the thread
- applications need chasing. Payers do not proactively tell you something is missing, and an application that sat untouched for six weeks looks identical to one progressing normally.
What we do
We run the whole sequence: prerequisites in the right order, applications to every payer in your intended mix, follow-up on a schedule, and a tracker you can actually see.
You get a realistic timeline at the start — including which payers will be slow — so the rest of your launch plan is built around real dates rather than hopeful ones.
Already open?
If you are running a practice and need enrollment, revalidation, or payer contract work, that lives here →
