CAQH (the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare) is a nonprofit whose ProView profile lets a provider submit credentialing data once for many health plans to reuse. It organizes self-reporteddata; primary-source federal records — NPPES, PECOS, and the OIG list’s 83,001 active exclusions — come straight from the source of record.
What CAQH is
CAQH is an alliance of health plans and industry groups that builds shared administrative infrastructure for healthcare. The problem it set out to solve is duplication: a provider who joins ten health plans used to fill out ten near-identical credentialing packets. CAQH centralizes that data so it is collected once and reused.
It is an administrative convenience layer, not a regulator or a source of record. The underlying facts — a license, an NPI, a Medicare enrollment, an exclusion — still live with the authorities that issue them.
CAQH ProView
ProView is the provider-facing profile most people mean when they say “CAQH.” A provider enters education, training, board status, licensure, work history, and malpractice coverage into one online record, uploads supporting documents, and authorizes participating health plans to pull from it during credentialing and enrollment. The provider maintains the profile; the plans consume it.
The re-attestation cycle
Because the profile is self-reported, CAQH requires providers to re-attest to its accuracy on a recurring cycle — roughly every few months — and to keep documents current. That cadence is the catch: a profile is only as fresh as the last attestation, and a fact can change the day after. This is why health plans treat the CAQH profile as a starting point and check the facts that carry risk against the primary source.
CAQH vs. primary-source data
- Entered by the provider
- Attested on a recurring cycle
- Organized for plan credentialing workflows
- A convenience layer, not a source of record
- Straight from CMS, OIG, or a license board
- The source of record for the fact
- Each field carries a source and snapshot date
- What a checker reconciles a profile against
The two are complementary: a CAQH profile speeds the workflow, primary-source data confirms the facts.
The primary-source layer by the numbers
Credentialing on primary-source data
See how Fonteum supplies the source-traced federal layer that credentialing teams check a provider profile against — each field stamped with its source and snapshot date.
Credentialing data →Frequently asked questions
- What is CAQH?
- CAQH (the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare) is a nonprofit alliance of health plans and trade associations that builds shared administrative tools for healthcare. Its best-known product, CAQH ProView, lets a provider enter their professional and credentialing information once into a single online profile that many health plans can then draw from, instead of each plan collecting it separately.
- What is CAQH ProView used for?
- CAQH ProView is a centralized provider data profile used in credentialing and enrollment. A provider completes one profile — education, training, licensure, work history, malpractice coverage, and more — and authorizes participating health plans to access it. It reduces duplicate paperwork across the many plans a provider may join.
- Is CAQH the same as an NPI?
- No. An NPI is a public national identifier from CMS that every provider needs to bill. A CAQH profile is a private credentialing data file used by health plans. They serve different purposes: the NPI identifies the provider; the CAQH profile carries the self-reported credentialing details a plan reviews.
- How often do you have to re-attest with CAQH?
- CAQH ProView requires providers to re-attest to the accuracy of their profile on a recurring cycle — roughly every few months — and to keep documents current. Because the data is self-reported and only as fresh as the last attestation, plans typically check key facts against primary sources rather than relying on the profile alone.
- How is CAQH data different from primary-source data?
- CAQH data is self-reported by the provider and attested on a cycle. Primary-source data comes straight from the issuing authority — a state license board, the NPPES registry, the CMS PECOS file, or the OIG exclusion list — and reflects the source of record. Fonteum publishes the primary-source federal layer, with each field traced to its source and snapshot date; CAQH organizes provider-submitted data for plan workflows.
- Does Fonteum provide CAQH data?
- No. Fonteum does not hold or resell CAQH profiles. It publishes primary-source federal provider data — the NPPES registry, CMS PECOS enrollment, and the OIG LEIE's 83,001 active exclusions — that credentialing teams use alongside a CAQH profile to check the facts that matter.
Related
- Credentialing data solution — the source-traced federal layer behind a credentialing workflow.
- What is an NPI number? — the public identifier every provider profile is keyed to.
- What is PECOS? Medicare enrollment — the primary source for a provider’s Medicare status.
- What is an OIG exclusion? — the exclusion check that belongs in every credentialing review.
- NPPES provider data — the public registry, its API, and bulk download.
- NPI lookup tool — check a provider’s public NPPES record by name or number.