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What Is Delegated Credentialing? How Assured Is Simplifying Physician Onboarding

You know what they say… the best time to get credentialed is six months ago. The next best time? Right now.

The credentialing process for physicians and providers is a convoluted, redundant mess. As someone who writes about healthcare inefficiencies every week and is just a year away from needing to navigate this process myself (note to self: start now), I can already feel my blood pressure creeping up.

In this article, I’ll dive into delegated credentialing—an often overlooked but critical process that plays a huge role in physician onboarding and reimbursement timelines.

The Deets: Delegated Credentialing

Credentialing, at its core, is pretty straightforward:

Every year, tens of thousands of residents and fellows graduate, ready to join the workforce. Add in the thousands of physicians switching jobs, and that’s a lot of people needing credentialing. 

In fact, the credentialing market is expected to grow from $2.63 billion to $6.47 billion by 2032—a clear sign that the industry is crying out for better solutions.

The process?

It’s outdated, siloed, and drowning in paperwork. On average, it takes 90–180 days—and in more complex cases, it can take even longer.

Take my friend and colleague Akiff Premjee, MD, for example. He’s in the process of getting credentialed right now and shared some thoughts:

I thought of him (obviously) while writing this newsletter and thought I’d check in.

Over 60 days later!

Anyway, let’s move to delegated credentialing, which is a concept designed to (hopefully) simplify this madness. Here’s how it works: a payer, like UnitedHealthcare, delegates the responsibility of credentialing to another organization, like Healthcare Huddle Hospital, which already has contracted rates with them. In this setup, Healthcare Huddle Hospital handles credentialing for its physicians and providers.

But with great power comes great responsibility. Healthcare Huddle Hospital must ensure all its providers meet the necessary qualifications. That means verifying education, residency training, licenses, certifications, and professional experience. It also means chasing down new physicians for missing paperwork and signatures—a full-time job in itself.

If you’re wondering why this process feels like a logistical nightmare, here are the main pain points:

1. For Physicians and Providers: The last thing you want after a decade of training and overwork is a delay in income and patient care due to long waits to start work.

2. For Healthcare Entities: Managing credentialing for hundreds of providers across multiple states and payers? It’s an administrative headache that keeps operations staff up at night.

Assured: Simplifying Delegated Credentialing

Just when I was on the verge of pulling my hair out trying to understand the messy credentialing process, I spoke with Rahul Shivkumar, who runs Assured. He brought my blood pressure back to baseline.

Assured takes the heavy lifting off the shoulders of delegated credentialers like my imaginary Healthcare Huddle Hospital, managing much of the credentialing process so they don't have to. With a track record of slashing credentialing timelines by 4-5 months across thousands of provider credentials, Assured isn't just another vendor making empty promises—they're the partner that's actually solving one of healthcare's most persistent headaches. 

Their system combines automation, AI, and human expertise to handle licensing, credentialing, and enrollment more efficiently:

• Automation: Streamlines repetitive tasks such as primary source verifications and roster submissions, alleviating the headaches typically associated with manual management.  

• Human Expertise: A dedicated team of credentialing specialists is available to tackle complex situations, address compliance challenges, and navigate the unique requirements posed by various payers.  

• Cost and Time Efficiency: Optimizes the entire process, significantly lowering administrative workloads and accelerating the onboarding timeline for physicians and providers.

Here’s how Assured gets it done:

1. End-to-End Credentialing Management: Assured works directly with physicians and providers to manage their credentialing from start to finish. This includes, information gathering from sources, following up on missing information, verifying credentials through primary sources, and creating comprehensive packets of information ready for audits.

2. Ongoing Monitoring: They monitor providers to ensure credentials remain up to date, notifying organizations if anything needs review or renewal. This is especially critical for compliance with payers and regulators.

3. Custom Roster Creation: Since every payer has different formatting requirements for rosters, Assured handles the heavy lifting by creating these rosters in the required format. If they don’t already have the format on file, they make it work by pulling provider data for manual formatting.

By partnering with Assured, healthcare organizations can scale their credentialing operations without increasing administrative staff—something that’s becoming a major priority for health systems and payers alike.

Dashevsky’s Dissection

Assured is a prime example of how to tackle operational chaos with smart innovation.

From a systems perspective, their approach screams efficiency (which I love). By slashing credentialing timelines, they help healthcare organizations avoid costly downtime—we're talking about potential savings of up to $20,000 per physician annually when you factor in lost revenue and administrative costs. Every day a physician isn't credentialed is a day of lost revenue and delayed patient care—and Assured steps in to stop the bleeding.

For physicians, let’s be honest: the credentialing process is beyond frustrating.

After more than a decade of intense training, it’s a bit demoralizing to hit an administrative wall that keeps you from doing what you were trained for. Assured fixes that, cutting through the red tape so doctors can focus on the one thing that truly matters—caring for patients.

On the business side, Assured’s value is a no-brainer. Time is money in healthcare, and their streamlined process saves both. By combining automation, human expertise, and compliance, they help organizations scale without adding to their admin teams. That means faster onboarding, stronger payer relationships, and a clear competitive edge.

What makes Assured stand out, in my opinion, is their AI-first approach to credentialing. While most credentialing firms are still pushing paper, Assured's machine learning algorithms are doing the heavy lifting—automatically validating credentials, flagging discrepancies, and even predicting when renewals will be needed. This doesn't just quicken turnaround time, it fundamentally reduces human error while scaling across thousands of providers.

With this kind of AI-powered approach, healthcare entities hold the power to turn credentialing into their strength, not weakness. Think about it… streamlining the onboarding process makes a strong first impression on new employees, getting them to work (and generating revenue) faster and improving overall job satisfaction. The ball is in their court to turn credentialing into a strategic advantage instead of a burden. But that's just my two cents.

In summary, Assured is transforming credentialing from a burdensome administrative task into a streamlined, strategic advantage. For delegated entities like hospitals, Assured provides the tools to make a great first impression on new hires, accelerate revenue generation, and enhance employee satisfaction. 

In a market projected to reach $6.47 billion by 2032, Assured stands out as a much-needed solution in a system riddled with inefficiencies.