The Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare (CAQH) is a non-profit alliance of health plans and trade associations who work together to simplify healthcare administration through public and private initiatives. One of those initiatives is the Universal Provider Datasource (UPD), and its purpose is to simplify data collection between providers, health plans, and networks in the US. This helps reduce the amount of paperwork and frustration involved in provider enrollment.
The UPD allows providers to register, free of charge, on the CAQH website and complete a uniform application that provides health plans, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations with reliable provider information for credentialing, claims processing, quality assurance, emergency response, member services, and more.
More than 1 million providers have registered, and more than 650 health plans and networks across the US use the UPD. Prominent provider organizations such as the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American College of Physicians (ACP), and others support the UPD. Furthermore, 13 states have adopted the CAQH Standard Provider Application as their mandated or designated provider credentialing form. It is an expanding service that is proving its usefulness by saving time, money, and a lot of trees.
The Barton Credentialing Department is seeing requests for CAQH profiles more and more. Unfortunately, in order to become a member, a healthcare facility or insurance company must ask the UPD to generate a CAQH number for the provider. Once that is generated, the provider can create a login and fill out the application. We are more than happy to help with that process in addition to updating a profile if it has expired or needs to be re-attested. Overall, we feel that this is a great initiative that saves time during the credentialing process and allows providers to focus on patients not paperwork.
For more information, please go to the CAQH website.
