Ensora Health’s free credentialing is here

There have always been three ways to pay for credentialing: with your evenings (10 to 15 hours of paperwork per application), with fees ($200 to $400+ per payer for a third-party service), or with a cut of every session you ever bill in-network. Now, clinicians have a fourth option: $0 extra, minimal paperwork, and a dedicated specialist team that does the enrollment work for you. 

Ensora Health now offers free credentialing services: a payer enrollment service designed to help you get in-network with leading payers like Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, and UnitedHealthcare, plus Medicare, Medicaid, and others, faster and easier. For a limited time, this service is included with our TheraNest and Fusion EHR platforms for new practices on Advanced and Premier plans. Here’s what it is, what it’s worth, and how to get started.

Get started with credentialing on TheraNest (built for mental & behavioral health) →
Get started with credentialing on Fusion (built for SLP, PT, OT) →

What is Ensora Credentialing? 

Ensora Credentialing pairs your practice with a dedicated credentialing specialist team that takes on the tedious parts of payer enrollment: preparing and submitting payer applications, tracking progress, following up with payers, reporting each payer’s decision, and coordinating timely follow-up on any information that may be delaying enrollment. Once you’re enrolled with a payer, the Ensora Health team can also assist with any needed EDI and ERA enrollments (the electronic connection that lets you submit claims). 

Your part is small, and it keeps you in control: choose the payers that fit your client mix, start your payer contracts, and share your documents, like your license, proof of malpractice coverage, and a complete DataSpring* profile. (Your specialist team can help you set up a profile if you don’t already have one.) 

*DataSpring is the new name for CAQH, the credentialing database most practices know. Nothing about your profile or process changed with the rebrand.  

And you’re never in the dark while it runs: you see what’s been submitted, what’s pending, and when billing can start, without chasing anyone for updates. Expanding your payer mix stops being a project you survive and becomes an easy decision you make. 

The real cost of credentialing for therapy practices 

Whichever kind of care you deliver, credentialing has been charging your practice something. The bill just looks different in rehab therapy than it does in behavioral or mental health. 

In rehab therapy, it’s hours and fees. Most speech-language pathology, physical therapy, and occupational therapy practices spend 10 to 15 hours of paperwork per payer application, or pay a third party $200 to $400+ per payer to handle it. With Fusion, credentialing is included alongside your core EHR features at no extra cost, and getting in-network with more insurance plans opens the practice to clients who find care through their coverage. 

In mental and behavioral health, it shows up in what you keep. Commission-based platforms can get you in-network fast, but that speed comes from adding you to the platform’s own group contract, so the panel belongs to them, and they take a cut of every session. Independent estimates put that cut at around 10% or more: on a $150 session, that’s at least $15 out of your pocket, every session, for as long as you stay. With TheraNest, nothing is taken out of your sessions, and your enrollments are filed in your own name, so the panels belong to you. Whether you’re adding insurance for the first time or leaving a platform, what you earn stays yours. 

For practices that currently rely on just one or two insurance plans, expanding the payer mix offers great value. The Medical Group Management Association notes that practices heavily reliant on lower-paying contracts can struggle with profitability, and points to diversifying payer relationships as part of the fix.^[4]  If a single payer lowers its rates or tightens its rules, a wider payer mix is what keeps revenue steady. 

Pressures like those are exactly why we’re offering free credentialing services. A wider payer mix is your practice’s best defense when any one plan cuts rates, and now it doesn’t have to cost your practice months of paperwork. 

Why does credentialing typically take so long? 

Credentialing takes as long as it does because the process was never designed to be run by a busy practice. Everyone has heard (or lived) the horror stories: applications that vanish into a payer’s queue, DataSpring (CAQH) attestations that expire mid-process, follow-up calls that go nowhere. When our team analyzed the payer enrollment process, the numbers backed up the stories:

Why so wide a range? Because the payer controls the timeline. After an application is submitted, it moves through that payer’s own verification checks, committee review, and claims-system setup, and no applicant gets to skip the line; even Medicare’s enrollment contractors publish set processing timeframes and note that incomplete applications add delays.^[1] 

What you can control is the start. The payer’s clock doesn’t begin until your enrollment is filed, so starting contracts and gathering documents early gets you in that queue sooner. The other thing you can control is who does the filing, and there are three reasons so many practices hand it off: 

• Every payer runs its own version of the process. Medicare alone runs enrollment through its own federal system, PECOS,^[2]  so there’s no single checklist to work from. 

• The know-how is niche. A DataSpring (CAQH) profile has to be re-attested every 120 days,^[3]  a deadline that’s easy to miss and expensive to blow. 

• The follow-up stretches across months, and that’s where applications stall. 

Here’s what each stage of the process asks of a practice, and what changes when Ensora Credentialing takes it on: 

The hidden costs of credentialing delays 

Third-party credentialing services charge real money, and doing it yourself charges something scarcer: clinical time. But the biggest cost shows up as absence. The clients who found an in-network practice down the road. The new clinician whose schedule sat half empty for their first quarter because their insurance enrollments weren’t active yet.  

Physician Sriman Swarup, MD, MBA, wrote about this dynamic on KevinMD after watching his own start date slip behind a payer enrollment queue, and his diagnosis of why delays persist fits therapy practices just as well: “Everyone owns a piece. Sometimes nobody owns the consequence.” Nobody at the practice is failing; the work is simply fragmented across people who each own a sliver of it.^[5] 

That fragmentation is exactly what our 2026 Practice Success Report surfaced. Of the 1,124 clinicians and practice leaders we surveyed, only 18% said their practice is truly thriving, and competing administrative demands were among the top barriers clinicians named. Credentialing sits squarely in that pile: important, tedious, nobody’s actual job, and quietly deciding how fast the practice grows. 

Growth that doesn’t cost your evenings 

The practices that thrive aren’t the ones that grind through administrative work better than everyone else; they’re the ones that hand it to people and systems built for it. Payer enrollment is now work you can hand off without breaking the bank. 

Getting started is simple: pick an Advanced or Premier plan, choose your payers, and your specialist team takes it from there. Request a demo to see what your practice could do with free credentialing support behind it. 

Sources 

• [1] Novitas Solutions (CMS Medicare Administrative Contractor), CMS-855 Enrollment Application Processing Timeframes: https://www.novitas-solutions.com/webcenter/portal/MedicareJL/pagebyid?contentId=00131972

• [2] Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Medicare Provider Enrollment and Certification (PECOS): https://www.cms.gov/medicare/enrollment-renewal/providers-suppliers/chain-ownership-system-pecos

• [3] DataSpring, powered by CAQH (formerly CAQH), provider data and attestation requirements: https://www.dataspring.com/ 

• [4] Medical Group Management Association, payer contracting and payer mix resources: https://www.mgma.com/payer-contracting-glossary 

• [5] Sriman Swarup, MD, MBA, “Physician credentialing delays should carry a consequence,” KevinMD (also linked inline): https://www.kevinmd.com/2026/08/physician-credentialing-delays-should-carry-a-consequence.html