Center for
Integrative Neuroscience

Research · The credentialing study

Payer enrollment differs by state and by payer. This first wave uses the Michigan payer grid, and the same study travels to other states from there.

The patient never sees the work before the first claim.

Applications. Portals. Missing documents. Calls. Corrections. Waiting. Every insurer has a process, and someone in the practice has to do it before a single visit can be billed.

We know whether a clinician eventually gets enrolled. We know much less about what it costs the practice to get them there.

The Cheat-Sheet comes first; the research question comes after it.

The Credentialing + Credentialing Cheat-Sheet Michigan payer grid · 2026 edition

Payer grid · enrollment checklists
Documentation templates · billing mechanics

CMS MLN909432 and public payer pages cited · Verified August 2026

The Credentialing Cheat-Sheet shown as a printed guide, an on-screen guide, and four card sets: the payer grid, the application, credentialing, and claims.
The cream guide is the Cheat-Sheet, and it is the part the Center gives unconditionally. The Practice Kit beside it answers a larger question and is available separately.

Complimentary from the Center

Written for the desk that keeps the claims moving.

The payer grid
What does each insurer require?
The application
What do I need before I start?
Credentialing
What are the approval steps, and what has to be kept current?
Claims
What to check on the first claim, and what to do with a denial.
Source notes
Where did this come from?

Open the guide →

No form between you and the guide. It is yours either way.

The Credentialing Cheat-Sheet is complete on its own. It answers one bounded question: what enrolling a Collaborative Care team in Michigan actually involves. It is not a sample of something else.

Tracking one practice’s enrollments and recredentialing dates, and working denials as they arrive, are ongoing operational work rather than the rest of this document. Public guidance can explain a rule. Your state, licenses, payers, contracts and staffing decide what applies to you. Kedge Marketplace is the separate platform for that individualized work.

Joining a network is a project. Nobody schedules it.

The Cheat-Sheet is the practical half. It puts the payer requirements, the documents, and the billing mechanics in one place, so the practice does not have to reconstruct the process from scratch.

Figure 01

The ledger nobody keeps.

One clinician, one insurer, one enrollment. Every line is real work. We do not have a defensible total for these fields.

Application ?
Entering practice and clinician information into the insurer’s application.
Documents ?
Licenses, certificates, insurance, and everything they ask for twice.
Follow-up ?
Calls and portal checks to find out where it stands.
Enrollment corrections ?
Work repeated before approval, because something was missing or wrong.
Waiting ?
Elapsed days between submitting and being able to bill.
Recredentialing ?
Doing much of it again on the payer’s own clock.
Claim denial work ?
Staff time spent fixing claims after participation begins.
Total staff time ?
The working hours one enrollment costs the practice.

Two clocks matter

Staff time. How many working hours the practice spends on enrollment.

Elapsed time. How long the process takes from application to participation.

A four-month enrollment does not mean four months of staff labour. This study measures both.

The question marks are not decoration. They are what this study is for.

We have not put numbers in these fields because we do not have defensible ones. The people who do this work do.

Center for Integrative Neuroscience · The credentialing study

What does insurance participation actually cost a practice?

Public data can tell us which clinicians are enrolled with which payers. It cannot tell us what the practice spent getting there: whose hours, how many, across how many weeks, and how much of it had to be done more than once.

The practice pays for that administrative work, and it is largely invisible in the enrollment record. Measuring it is the study.

A note on the rulesRequirements differ by payer and change over time, which is part of why the work is expensive. The Cheat-Sheet states what the public payer pages and CMS booklet MLN909432 say, with the date we checked. Dated notifications when something changes for your practice are the Brief Wire at Kedge.

The exchange · about five minutes

Five minutes, if the Cheat-Sheet earned them.

The people doing this work can fill in the ledger. Five minutes on enrollment time, follow-up, corrections, denials, and repeated work turns those question marks into evidence the field can use.

Findings go to respondents first.

About 5 minutes

Staff hours · elapsed time · who does the work · corrections and re-dos · recredentialing · claim denials

The survey

The study is not collecting responses yet.

When it opens, the invitation you received will return you to this page. The guide above is complete and yours to use now.

At the end, three permissions are asked separately: whether we may follow up, whether we may quote you anonymously, and whether you want the findings. None is required. You will see any proposed quote before we use it.