CAQH profile maintenance: the attestation cycle, what goes stale, and a quarterly routine

What is CAQH profile maintenance?

CAQH profile maintenance is the work of keeping a provider’s record in the CAQH Provider Data Portal current and attested, so that every health plan the provider has authorized sees accurate data when it credentials, enrolls or lists that provider. CAQH describes clinician profiles as maintained on a 120-day attestation cycle¹; its fact sheet puts the same habit as updating your profile quarterly to reduce telephone and email requests from plans³. Either way you re-attest at least three times a year, and a quarterly routine stays ahead of the due date.

The name around the portal changed on June 7, 2026, when CAQH rebranded as DataSpring, powered by CAQH⁵. Its clinician Q&A says no action is needed: login credentials and portal access are unchanged, and saved links continue to work or redirect². Most billers still say CAQH ProView, and the login still sits at a proview.caqh.org address². The product is the CAQH Provider Data Portal, and the data in it is what authorized plans use for credentialing, enrollment and directory management¹.

The scale explains why plans lean on it. More than 2.5 million providers have a complete profile, and around 1,000 health plans and all 50 states accept the credentialing application³. The portal is provided at no cost to clinicians, provider groups and practices¹.

Why does a lapsed attestation cost money?

Because the plan treats an unattested profile as unreliable, and everything that depends on the profile stops. A new enrollment application that points to a stale profile waits. A re-credentialing cycle that pulls the profile finds an expired document and sends a request for information, then waits for the answer. A plan directory keeps showing the old address, which is a compliance problem for the plan and a referral problem for you.

The portal assumes the provider keeps it current; that is the whole bargain behind entering the data once and sharing it with the plans you designate¹. Miss the attestation and the plans’ questions come to you one at a time instead. Credentialing is the plan verifying what you told it, and a profile that has not been attested is, to the plan, something you have not yet told it.

The billing symptom arrives last. A provider whose participation lapses because re-credentialing stalled starts drawing CO-B7 denials: not certified or enrolled with the payer for this service on that date. By the time the first one posts, the gap is weeks old and every visit in it is at risk.

What goes stale between attestations?

Three kinds of data: documents with expiration dates, facts that change when the practice changes, and authorizations that change when the payer mix changes. CAQH’s provider data runs to hundreds of data points, including names, specialties, practice locations, contact information, licenses, credentials, affiliations, network participation and whether the clinician is accepting new patients⁴. Each has its own way of going wrong.

The last row is the quiet one. Credentialing applications ask for a work history without unexplained gaps, and a profile attested from memory every few months tends to end at the last date anyone sat down and typed.

What does a quarterly routine look like?

Run it in a fixed week tied to the attestation due date, not to the calendar quarter, so attesting is the last step rather than the only step. Four steps, in order.

Step 1: pull the expirables

Open the practice’s expirables list for every provider: license, DEA, board certification, malpractice and any state-specific registration. Compare each date with the document in the portal. Anything renewed since the last attestation gets the new document uploaded. Anything expiring before the next attestation gets a reminder on the credentialing calendar now, not in four months.

Step 2: reconcile locations, contacts and affiliations

Walk the location list against the practice’s current sites. Confirm the phone, fax and email a plan would use to reach you. Check hospital affiliations against the medical staff office’s current list. Update the accepting-new-patients flag for each location while you are in there.

Step 3: check the authorizations

List the payers the practice bills today. Any plan not authorized to view the profile cannot credential from it; any plan you no longer work with can come off. Confirm delegate access as well: the portal lets a provider delegate staff to manage non-sensitive information on their behalf³, and that access should match who does the work now, not who did it two years ago.

Step 4: attest and record

Attest in the portal, then write the attestation date and the next due date into the credentialing tracker beside the Medicare revalidation and payer re-credentialing dates. The revalidation entry covers Medicare’s own cycle, which runs independently and belongs on the same calendar. So do PECOS changes, because a group or address change made there and not in CAQH is a mismatch a plan will eventually find.

Who should own it?

One named person with delegate access, a calendar and a list, and a second person who can step in. In a small practice that is usually the office manager. In a group that works with a billing partner, it is usually the credentialing specialist on the billing team, who already holds the expirables calendar and the payer enrollment tracker and sees the first CO-B7 when something slips.

Ownership matters more than the title. Notices go to whoever is on the account, and a reminder that lands in a departed employee’s inbox is a lapse waiting to happen. Put the next attestation date on the same weekly report as applications submitted, approved and pending, and the question “is CAQH current?” gets answered before a plan asks it.