Your credentialing process is a black box—and it's too slow

Executive Summary

Traditional credentialing vendors force telehealth startups into a 60–120 day black box where providers sit idle, costing $65,000 per FTE per month in lost revenue. Bridge cuts that timeline to 30 days on average and provides real-time visibility into every enrollment—so you can actually plan launches, model revenue, and coordinate marketing around when providers will be live. The difference isn't luck or company size. It's infrastructure built specifically to handle enrollment complexity at startup scale, with incentives aligned to your growth: we only make money when your providers are seeing patients.

Today’s reality

Your VP of Operations opens the "Provider Enrollment Master Tracker v7_FINAL_updated.xlsx" spreadsheet. It has 847 rows.

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Each row represents a single enrollment: one provider, one state, one health plan. Dr. Martinez across 12 states with 4 major payers? That's 48 rows. Your team of 15 providers? That's 720 potential enrollments you need to track.

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Column headers stretch across the screen: Submission Date, Portal Username, Last Check Date, Status (as of when?), Effective Date (if we ever got the letter), Notes ("Called rep on 10/15, left voicemail"), Follow-up Owner...

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Your ops person tells you: "I think Dr. Chen is live with United in California. Let me check... yeah, we got the approval letter three weeks ago. Wait, no—that was Colorado. California is still pending. I called them last Tuesday. Or was it Thursday?"

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You need to answer a simple question: When can we start marketing our diabetes program in Texas?

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No one knows.

Now imagine this instead

You open the Bridge dashboard and see real-time status across all 720 enrollments. Dr. Chen's California enrollment moved to approved yesterday—effective date November 18th. Dr. Martinez's Texas enrollments are tracking normally, two in final review and expected to clear within the week. Three enrollments flagged in red need follow-up on missing documentation, and Bridge's team is already on it.

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You can answer the question: We'll be ready to launch marketing in Texas by November 20th, and here are the five providers who'll be live and ready for patients.

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The difference between these two scenarios isn't luck or company size. It's infrastructure. Bridge built this infrastructure specifically so telehealth companies don't have to. And for startups losing $65,000 per month in potential revenue for every idle provider, that infrastructure unlocks growth.

What we're actually talking about

Quick definitions, because this process has confusing terminology:

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Credentialing is verifying a provider's qualifications and onboarding them into a medical group. Think: primary source verifications - checking licenses, malpractice history, education, references.

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Enrollment is getting that credentialed provider into health plan networks so they can bill insurance for patient visits. This happens state by state, plan by plan, because national contracts require large, established medical groups– something telehealth startups don’t yet have.

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Most telehealth companies understand credentialing takes time. What catches them off guard is enrollment—the thing that actually gates revenue.

The delegated credentialing mirage

Many founders hear about delegated credentialing and think they've found the shortcut. Here's how it's supposed to work: instead of enrolling each individual provider with each health plan, the health plan delegates credentialing authority to your medical group. Your group credentials the provider once, and the health plan accepts that credentialing across all their networks.

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Sounds perfect. But there's a reason most startups can't use it.

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Every health plan sets different requirements for delegated credentialing. Aetna requires a minimum of 500 providers. Highmark requires your medical group to have existed for at least three years. Some require that you've already successfully maintained delegated credentialing agreements with other health plans first—they won't be your first.

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And even if you meet the size and tenure requirements, you still need existing relationships with each health plan. They're not handing delegated credentialing authority to organizations they don't know and trust.

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For a telehealth startup with 15 providers that's been around for 18 months? Delegated credentialing isn't an option. You need a process that works now, at your current scale, with your current relationships.

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When you can't rely on delegated credentialing, you need a partner who's already built the infrastructure to make individual enrollments work at scale. That means automation, speed, and visibility across hundreds of simultaneous enrollments—without you having to build it yourself.

The exponential complexity no one warns you about

Enrollment complexity doesn't scale linearly. It multiplies exponentially.

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Here's the math: 10 providers across 8 states with 4 major health plans creates 320 individual enrollments. Each enrollment takes 60–120 days on average through traditional vendors. Each one moves at different speeds with different requirements. Each one can get stuck for different reasons.

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And every single health plan has a slightly different process. United's portal works differently than Aetna's. Blue Cross in Texas has different requirements than Blue Cross in Florida. Some send approval letters by mail. Some update their portals. Some never tell you anything unless you call.

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You can't just "figure out credentialing" once and be done. You're learning 320 different workflows, with 320 different timelines, and 320 different ways things can go wrong.

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What this unlocks: When you partner with Bridge, you get infrastructure that's already been built to handle this exponential complexity. We've automated submission and tracking across all major health plans. We merge provider data from CAQH so credentialing files take 3–5 minutes to complete instead of hours. We've mapped the edge cases and requirements for each health plan so enrollments go through clean the first time. You're not learning 320 processes or spending years building systems to handle them. We've already done that work. Our credentialing and enrollment infrastructure handles the complexity so you can focus on delivering care.

Why startups can't afford the standard timeline

Most credentialing vendors charge >$100 per enrollment and take 60–120 days to get providers live. That's fine if you're an established health system with predictable cash flow.

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But if you're a telehealth startup? Every month your providers sit idle is $65,000 per FTE provider in lost revenue. That's not just disappointing—it's potentially fatal to your growth trajectory.

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Startups need velocity. You need to know roughly when providers will be revenue-generating so you can plan marketing spend around go-live dates, model quarterly revenue accurately, give providers realistic start date expectations, and coordinate state launches with enrollment timelines.

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The traditional credentialing vendor model doesn't work for this because the incentives aren't aligned. They get paid $100 per enrollment whether it takes 30 days or 180 days. They have no reason to optimize for speed.

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What this unlocks: When your infrastructure partner only makes money when your providers are seeing patients and generating revenue, suddenly you have aligned incentives. Speed matters to them because it matters to you. Our average time from submission to effective date is 30 days, not 60–120 days. Because when you sit idle, we sit idle.

Speed without visibility still leaves you blind

But speed alone doesn't solve the planning problem. You also need to know what's happening in real time.

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When your enrollment data lives in a spreadsheet that gets manually updated every few days, you can't plan with any precision. Your ops team is guessing when they tell you "probably sometime next month." That uncertainty compounds across every business decision you're trying to make.

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You can't confidently schedule a provider's first patients because you don't know when they'll actually be approved. You can't coordinate marketing launches with go-live dates because those dates are fuzzy at best. You can't model when each provider cohort will hit revenue targets because you're working with 60-day ranges instead of actual status updates. And you can't troubleshoot effectively when something's stuck because you don't know if it's been stuck for 3 days or 30 days.

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Traditional credentialing vendors tell you: "We've submitted your 10 new providers across 8 states. Should hear back in 60–90 days. We'll update you when we know more." You're waiting and hoping.

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What this unlocks: Real-time visibility into every step of the enrollment process. Bridge has built the Domino's pizza tracker, but for credentialing and enrollment. You can see exactly where each provider stands in the process: submitted, pending review, approved, effective date confirmed. Not "as of last Tuesday when someone checked." Today.

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You can see which providers just moved from pending to approved, which are awaiting additional documents, which are tracking normally, and which hit unexpected delays that need escalation. Instead of "Dr. Smith will be live sometime next quarter," you can see that her United enrollment was submitted two weeks ago and is currently in pending review status.

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You still can't predict the exact date—health plans move at their own pace—but you can see real-time status and troubleshoot immediately if something gets stuck. When an enrollment sits at "pending additional information" for two weeks, Bridge's team knows exactly where to intervene. You're not waiting until day 90 to realize something's wrong.

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With data across hundreds of enrollments, Bridge monitors patterns and handles the follow-up work: which enrollments need escalation, which are tracking normally, where intervention is needed. Because the submission and tracking is automated, Bridge submits to all relevant health plans simultaneously rather than trying to prioritize which ones to tackle first. Your provider experience improves because you can give realistic timelines based on current status instead of vague estimates. Your revenue planning gets more predictable because you're working with real-time data instead of 90-day windows. Your ops team isn't drowning in manual portal checks—Bridge handles that monitoring and focuses intervention where it's actually needed.

The infrastructure advantage

The complexity of credentialing and enrollment doesn't go away. 320 enrollments is still 320 enrollments, each with different requirements and timelines. Health plans still move at their own pace, and you can't force them to approve faster than their internal processes allow.

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But when you combine speed—because incentives are aligned—with visibility—because Bridge has already built the infrastructure—complexity becomes manageable. You're not hoping the black box eventually spits out approvals. You're working with a system that moves as fast as possible and keeps you informed at every step.

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And here's where Bridge’s integrated platform advantage becomes critical: this enrollment data doesn't sit in isolation. It automatically feeds into our eligibility engine and revenue cycle management. When a patient checks eligibility, our platform already knows which of your providers are enrolled with that patient's health plan. Via API, Bridge delivers the providers who are actually eligible to see that patient—no manual cross-referencing, no spreadsheet lookups, no risk of billing with a provider who isn't actually enrolled yet.

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Without an integrated platform, you're manually updating enrollment status in multiple systems: your credentialing tracker, your eligibility checker, your billing system. Three sources of truth that inevitably fall out of sync. With Bridge, there's one source of truth that flows through the entire platform. When Dr. Chen gets approved in California, that data immediately powers eligibility checks and claim submissions. It just works.

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This is what infrastructure unlocks: You can plan state launches strategically because you know typical enrollment timelines. You can model quarterly revenue based on real enrollment progress. You can give new providers firm expectations about when they'll start seeing patients. And you can trust that when a patient books an appointment, the system already knows that provider is enrolled and ready to bill—no manual verification needed.

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That's what infrastructure should do: take something impossibly complex and make it reliably fast and transparent—without you having to build it.

What to do next

If you're managing credentialing with spreadsheets and 60–120 day timelines while losing $65,000 per month per idle provider, there's a better way.

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We've built the infrastructure that gets providers live in 30 days on average and gives you real-time visibility into exactly where each enrollment stands.

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Want to see what that looks like for your company? Talk with our team. We'll walk you through how we'd handle your specific enrollment needs and show you what real-time visibility means for your planning.

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