License numbers, malpractice history, board certifications, work history: the same fields, the same attestations, submitted to health plan after health plan by provider after provider, one CAQH profile re-keyed into a dozen different systems. It's repetitive, it's exhausting, and none of it adds a single minute of patient care. Today, we're doing something about it.
We're launching the only National Shared Credentialing Program, SharedCred, the first initiative of its kind, built to give providers one centralized credentialing home instead of a fragmented one. We are grateful to be joined by founding partners UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, and Centene, who have the same urgency for change. SharedCred comes online this fall and is available to any health plan or provider organization that wants to reduce the administrative burden of health care.
The cost of doing this the old way
The numbers on credentialing today are staggering, and they get worse the closer you look. The U.S. spends more than $2 billion a year verifying provider credentials, and as much as 75 percent of that spend is avoidable when the industry works off one shared source of truth instead of dozens of disconnected ones. Health plans spend between $200 and $500 per provider on every recredentialing cycle - often repeating work another health plan already paid for, on the very same provider, months earlier. Providers, meanwhile, submit an average of 17 applications a year, staffing for administrative support and submitting paperwork when they could be spending time with patients instead.
Inefficient provider data management is a tax on the entire system, and it falls hardest on the people credentialing was supposed to protect: providers trying to get to work, and the patients waiting for them to get there. Credentialing is the first place we're attacking but we won't stop building the infrastructure that makes healthcare more efficient.
Why we think credentialing should be a commodity, not a competitive edge
Credentialing is a commodity. There we said it!
Health plans do not compete on the basis of provider data. We have repeatedly confirmed this in dozens of conversations. They certainly don't compete on their credentialing process. It's a commodity that everyone is required to complete. It's a zero-sum game. Health plans should never compete on the basis of credentialing. There is far more important work for the health plans that serve our loved ones to complete. It's table stakes - a compliance function every payer has to get right, using largely the same primary sources, against largely the same standards. When something is truly a commodity, the market should treat it like one: standardized, efficient, and shared. SharedCred will make that real, so health plans can put their energy into the things that actually differentiate them - network strategy, member experience, the quality of care their members receive.
We sit across the table from health plan operations leaders every day, and we hear some version of the same story every time: the same provider, verified from scratch, by yet another team, using yet another system, weeks after a different plan just finished doing the exact same work. Nobody designed the system to work this way. SharedCred exists because that redundancy has a real cost, and providers and health plans have both been paying it for years. SharedCred is the utility that makes credentialing the trusted, compliant commodity you always wanted it to be.
We're not starting small
SharedCred launches with more than 1.4 million providers in scope across our initial health plan partners, a larger footprint on day one than any single-vendor credential verification organization (CVO) operates at today, outside of the more than 2 million providers CertifyOS already serves across our existing book of business. That's the kind of technology-driven scale that health plans have grown to trust. CertifyOS is in a position to standardize credentialing for a meaningful share of the practicing providers in the country. This isn't a pilot. It's the infrastructure that changes the provider data industry.
This is just the beginning
We didn't build CertifyOS to be a better credentialing vendor. We built it to be the infrastructure the next generation of provider data runs on. This is a continuously updated source of truth, powered by AI and thousands of primary sources, that gets more accurate and more useful the more the industry runs on it. SharedCred is the clearest expression of that thesis yet: proof that shared infrastructure beats duplicated effort, at a scale the industry hasn't tried before.
Credentialing is the first place we're proving this out, but it won't be the last. The same shared, AI-forward approach that lets us standardize credentialing across health plans can extend to licensing, monitoring, attestations, and the rest of the provider data lifecycle. We're building the infrastructure to fix anywhere the industry has been solving the same problem over and over, independently, at its own expense. That's the future we're building toward. SharedCred is step one.
If you're a health plan leader who wants to see what a shared credentialing model looks like in practice, we'd like to talk: certifyos.com/sharedcred
Sources: Figures on credentialing costs, recredentialing spend, and provider application volume are drawn from CertifyOS's National Shared Credentialing Program announcement (September 2026). Provider scale figures (1.4M+ in SharedCred's initial scope; 2M+ in CertifyOS's existing book of business) reflect CertifyOS internal data as of September 2026.