UnitedHealthcare, Cigna and Centene back one shared credentialing program
CertifyOS has signed UnitedHealthcare, Cigna Healthcare and Centene as the first participants in a national shared credentialing program, testing whether large payers will buy one verified provider record instead of rebuilding it plan by plan.
UnitedHealthcare, Cigna Healthcare and Centene have signed on as the first participants in a national shared credentialing program run by CertifyOS, a provider data company, with a launch planned for this fall. A provider enters credentialing information once through CertifyOS, which verifies it and administers recredentialing for every participating health plan. 1
No equity changed hands and no deal value exists to report. The arrangement is a subscription service bought by three of the largest U.S. health plans, and it tests whether payers will let an outside vendor hold the common credentialing layer that decides how fast a doctor can start billing them. 2
Program card
| Field | What is known |
|---|---|
| Announced | September 23, 2026, by CertifyOS; reported the same day by Becker's Payer and the following day by MedCity News. 123 |
| Structure | A vendor-run credentialing program with health plans as initial participants. 1 |
| Participants | UnitedHealthcare, Cigna Healthcare and Centene. 1 |
| Mechanics | Participating plans share their recredentialing rosters with CertifyOS, which administers credentialing and runs primary source verification to NCQA and Medicaid standards across all licensure states. Providers enter their CAQH identifier and required information once. 13 |
| Launch | Fall 2026. 1 |
| Pricing | A per-provider, per-year subscription. The amount was not published. 2 |
| Financial terms | No investment, acquisition or equity stake was disclosed; this is a service contract. 1 |
The duplication the program is aimed at
CertifyOS puts U.S. spending on provider credential verification at more than $2 billion a year and says as much as 75% of that cost is avoidable if plans work from one verified record. Health plans spend $200 to $500 per provider per recredentialing cycle, duplicating the same checks across dozens of systems, while the average provider submits 17 applications a year at a cost of roughly $700 in time and effort. 1 Becker's Payer and MedCity News carried the same figures from the announcement. 23
Those numbers come from CertifyOS rather than from an independent study, and the company sells the fix. What is independently checkable is the structure: today each plan runs its own primary source verification, and each provider repeats the same submission for each plan. 1
What CertifyOS brings
CertifyOS entered the market in 2021 as a credentialing platform and now sells the wider provider data lifecycle — credentialing, licensing, monitoring and roster management — through a single data layer that its customers reach by API. 4
It raised a $40 million Series B in June 2025 led by Transformation Capital, with General Catalyst, Upfront Ventures and SemperVirens participating, bringing total funding to $69 million. The company reports that customers see a 40% reduction in administrative costs, a 30% improvement in provider data accuracy and provider onboarding cut from months to days; those are the vendor's own figures. 4
Why UnitedHealthcare signed on
UnitedHealthcare's stated interest is administrative burden. "Health care providers often face duplicative credentialing requirements that create unnecessary complexities," said Mike Kane, senior vice president of provider data operations at UnitedHealthcare. "This model will help streamline that process and allow providers to spend more time focused on patient care." 1
The payer has reasons to care beyond provider goodwill. UnitedHealthcare served 48.5 million people in the second quarter of 2026 and has committed to cutting 30% of its prior approval volume by the end of 2026 and standardizing electronic submission for more than 70% of prior approvals, work that depends on clean provider data moving between plans and practices. 5 Credentialing is a separate process from prior approval, but both run on the same provider record, and both carry administrative cost that employers and regulators have been pressing plans to reduce. 1
The incumbent this has to live beside
The credentialing market already has a shared utility, and some of the same payers own it. CAQH, the 25-year-old organization health plans originally founded, became insurer-owned earlier in 2026 and rebranded to DataSpring in June. It maintains more than 4.8 million provider-sourced records and links eligibility information for more than three-quarters of covered patients in the U.S., and its shareholders include UnitedHealth Group, Centene, Aetna, Elevance Health, Cigna, Humana and several Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. 6
DataSpring's chief executive, Sarah Ahmad, said the company plans to convene organizations around a provider data collective and set a national data quality standard. 6
So UnitedHealthcare and Centene hold ownership in one shared provider-data organization and, through this program, have now committed to a competing vendor's shared credentialing service. Payers keeping two routes to a verified provider record open changes the economics for whichever one wins the workflow: shared infrastructure only saves money once most plans in a market accept the same record. 16
The regulatory backdrop
Provider data accuracy is no longer only an operating preference for Medicare Advantage plans. Under the contract year 2026 Medicare Advantage final rule, plans must publish provider directories in a specified format and attest annually to the accuracy of the directory information they submit to CMS. 7 Verified credentialing records feed the same provider files that directory listings, network adequacy filings and claims routing depend on, which turns data accuracy into a compliance cost rather than a back-office annoyance. 17
What it changes for digital health
The buying signal is the clearest part. Three national plans have agreed to pay a subscription for shared infrastructure instead of building or owning it, which lowers the bar for other plans to follow and gives a vendor a position that used to belong to an insurer-owned utility. 12
The open risk sits with the vendor's neutrality. CertifyOS will administer credentialing for competing plans using rosters those plans supply, and the value of the program rises as more plans join and more provider records are verified once rather than many times. Whether plans will keep feeding a shared vendor that also serves their competitors is exactly the question CAQH answered over 25 years by becoming owned by the plans themselves. 16
What remains unproven is the outcome. CertifyOS says the program will accelerate time-to-network and reduce cost; no baseline for time-to-network, application volume or error rates has been published, and no participating plan has committed to reporting those measures after launch. 13
What to watch next
- The fall 2026 launch: whether the service goes live with all three plans participating from the start, and on what schedule. 1
- More participants: whether additional national plans or state Medicaid programs join, which would decide whether this becomes the default route or a second option. 1
- Published results: time-to-network, applications per provider and data-accuracy rates measured against a stated baseline, rather than the vendor's headline percentages. 4
- The competing standard: whether DataSpring's provider data collective ships a quality framework that plans adopt first. 6
- Payer disclosure: whether UnitedHealthcare, Cigna or Centene name the program in their own materials, as Cigna's provider newsroom has begun to. 3
Three large plans have agreed to share one credentialing pipeline. The proof will come from how many providers actually get credentialed through it, and how quickly.
References
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- 6Insurer-owned CAQH rebrands to DataSpring
beckershospitalreview.com
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