Chathri Ali

Accel Health

Built Physician Credentialing Automation That Reduced Onboarding Time from 90 to 30 Days

Physician credentialing was stuck in the dark ages - a 90-120 day manual paperwork shuffle between physicians, insurance companies, and hospitals that delayed patient care and cost physicians thousands in lost income. Doctors couldn't see patients or receive payment until fully credentialed, creating a painful bottleneck that hurt both healthcare providers and the physicians trying to serve their communities. I led my team to build and launch an automation solution in just 3 months by taking a focused, iterative approach. We started by mapping the entire credentialing workflow alongside our first hospital partner, Soma Medical in West Palm Beach, to identify the most critical bottlenecks. Rather than boiling the ocean, we made the strategic decision to build an MVP concentrated solely on primary source verification, the slowest and most painful part of the process. Our engineering team shipped a working prototype in 6 weeks, then we spent the next 6 weeks piloting it with 10 physicians to validate the solution in a real-world environment. The results exceeded expectations. During the pilot, we reduced credentialing time by 67% for our pilot physician group. After full launch, we onboarded 25 hospital systems in the first month and hit $1M ARR, representing a 200% revenue increase. Our first partner, Soma Medical, doubled their credentialing volume with us after just one month, and their credentialing coordinator was able to onboard two new hires quickly and get them seeing patients sooner, transforming what had been a months-long administrative burden into a streamlined, predictable process.