Healthcare organizations are built to deliver care. But before providers can begin seeing patients, they first need to be credentialed, enrolled, approved, and ready to practice.
That process is taking longer than many organizations can afford.
Hospital credentialing — the verification process that confirms a provider’s education, training, licensure, certifications, and work history — typically takes between 60 and 120 days. In some cases, timelines can extend beyond six months depending on specialty, payer enrollment requirements, and internal review processes.
At the same time, healthcare demand continues to rise.
Industry-wide, provider wait times have increased 19% in just two years, rising from 26 days in 2024 to 31 days in 2026.
While credentialing is essential for patient safety and compliance, the operational impact of delays reaches far beyond onboarding timelines. Providers cannot deliver care until they are cleared, credentialed, and billable — meaning every slowdown affects access, staffing, and revenue simultaneously.
And those slowdowns are happening across nearly every stage of provider readiness.
Healthcare teams report delays in collecting provider data (32%), completing primary source verifications (31%), generating compliant credentialing files (31%), and waiting for committee approvals or denials (41%).
The challenge for many organizations is that these delays compound. A missing document or delayed verification early in the process can create downstream bottlenecks that push onboarding timelines back by weeks or even months.
For hospitals and health systems already navigating staffing shortages, those delays can have meaningful consequences.
Patient appointments may be postponed or rescheduled. Wait times across departments increase. Newly hired providers may remain unable to see patients despite being fully recruited and employed.
Operationally, organizations also absorb the cost of underutilized staff capacity and delayed time-to-productivity. Financially, revenue generation may stall while providers wait to complete credentialing and payer enrollment requirements.
Many healthcare leaders are now reevaluating the systems behind credentialing and enrollment workflows as they look for ways to improve provider readiness timelines.
Traditionally, credentialing has relied heavily on fragmented administrative processes. Provider data is often managed across spreadsheets, emails, PDFs, legacy systems, and third-party vendors, creating duplicate work and limited visibility into application status.
Payer enrollment introduces additional complexity. Even after hospital credentialing is complete, providers may still need to finalize enrollment with insurance payers before they can begin billing for care delivered. Because these processes are frequently managed separately, delays in one workflow can create cascading slowdowns across the broader onboarding timeline.
Healthcare organizations are increasingly turning to digital credentialing infrastructure to help reduce those inefficiencies.
By centralizing provider information, automating verification workflows, and improving coordination across credentialing and enrollment teams, organizations may be able to reduce administrative burden while accelerating provider readiness.
Faster onboarding can also improve provider experience. Long onboarding timelines can create frustration for clinicians eager to begin practicing, particularly in competitive labor markets where organizations are working to recruit and retain talent quickly.
The broader goal for many health systems is not simply faster credentialing — it is reducing unnecessary operational friction that prevents providers from delivering care.
According to Medallion data, organizations using modernized credentialing and enrollment workflows can move 3.5x faster than legacy verification organizations, reduce administrative costs by 66%, and accelerate payer enrollment timelines by 2x to unlock revenue sooner.
As healthcare organizations continue balancing workforce shortages, rising patient demand, and operational pressures, provider readiness is becoming an increasingly strategic priority.
Because ultimately, patients can’t wait — but providers often still have to.
Read the original Medallion article here.
