The Industry Keeps Announcing “The First” Shared Credentialing Program Written By Tim Belter Share this By Christopher Redhage, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, ProviderTrust The industry loves throwing this launch party. This is the second one in about thirteen months with the same banner over the door: “FIRST.” On September 23, CertifyOS announced its National Shared Credentialing Program. In its own press release, the company called it “the first national shared credentialing program.” Several prominent health plans signed on as founding participants: one shared verifications packet, one coordinated recredentialing date, one portal for providers to submit their information once. Thirteen months earlier, on August 18, 2025, a different company put out a press release with this headline: “Medallion Raises $43 Million to Expand AI Infrastructure and Launch the First National Credentialing Clearinghouse.” Medallion called its new product, CredAlliance, “the industry’s first shared credentialing infrastructure for payers.” Verify a provider once, syndicate the result across participating payer networks. Already live with several major national payers at the time. Here they are, side by side. August 18, 2025 — Medallion “Medallion is publicly launching CredAlliance, the industry’s first shared credentialing infrastructure for payers.”Cited cost of duplication: $1.2 billion a year. (source) September 23, 2026 — CertifyOS “CertifyOS… today announced the launch of its National Shared Credentialing Program, a first-of-its-kind credentialing model…”Cited cost of duplication: $2 billion-plus a year. (source) Same idea. Same kind of savings number. Same claim to being first. We’re not pointing this out to take a shot at either company, the underlying problem is real, and getting competing health plans to agree on a shared packet and a shared date is a genuine operational achievement. We’re pointing it out because this is the second time in about a year the industry has needed a new “first,” and that’s worth asking why. Here’s our theory: the party hasn’t changed. The game underneath it has. This was never a workflow story. It’s a data story. The game changed. Nobody sent out a press release for that. Getting competing health plans to agree on a shared packet and a shared recredentialing date is a coordination win, and a real one. It’s also the same game the industry keeps re-winning, under a new name, every year or so. Coordination was never the part that decided whether credentialing actually worked. That job belongs to the data underneath it, and it doesn’t run on the recredentialing cycle’s schedule. A shared packet is still a snapshot, whether one plan assembles it or three plans share it. A provider’s risk profile doesn’t hold still between snapshots. Licenses lapse. Exclusions get added. Sanctions land. All on their own timeline. The part neither press release leads with is whether the data inside that packet is actually right, continuously, not just on the day it was assembled. That’s a data problem, not a workflow problem. It’s also the reason this keeps getting relaunched: coordinating the event is a real, visible, announceable win. Making the data underneath it hold up every day in between is not, and it’s a lot harder. What we’ve built instead We’ve spent 16 years on the unglamorous part. DynamicNPI® returns a fully verified provider profile from a single NPI in 0.5 seconds, across 4.1 million providers monitored nationwide, on an ongoing basis, not once a cycle. That data supports event-based recredentialing, continuous monitoring, or use across your entire organization, however you need it. What we’ve built is the verified data layer, not the workflow, and it’s available however your team already works: through the app, the API, or your own AI agents. Coordinating a shared event is a real win. We’d just rather show up already knowing the data holds up, every day, not just on launch day. See it for yourself See how ProviderTrust approaches credentialing data: Credentialing Data Or see DynamicNPI® directly: DynamicNPI Ask us again next fall, when it’s someone else’s turn to be first. We’ll be the ones still on the dance floor, same as we have been for 16 years.
