Your Q4 Credentialing Close-Out: 10 Things to Finish Before January
10/28/2026
Ten weeks left in the year, two of which are effectively unusable because nobody at any payer answers the phone between December 20 and January 2.
Here is what to finish, ordered by what costs the most if it slips.
1. Every expirable that lapses in Q1
Not Q4 — Q1. Licenses, DEA registrations, malpractice coverage, board certifications expiring January through March.
The reason this is first: document collection depends on the provider, providers are least responsive in December, and a credential that lapses on January 15 needed its renewal started in November. Pull the list of everything expiring in the next 120 days and start chasing the January and February items now.
2. Q1 re-credentialing cycles
Same logic, longer lead time. A re-credentialing due in February needs its packet assembled in December, because the payer's clock is indifferent to your holiday schedule.
If you have a twelve-month forward view of re-credentialing dates, this is a filter. If you do not, this is the argument for building one.
3. CAQH attestations aging past 90 days
More payers read from CAQH than write to you. A stale attestation degrades quietly — no denial on the day it lapses, no notification, just a record that has stopped being confirmed current while the provider keeps seeing patients.
Sort your providers by last attestation date, ascending. Work down from the top.
4. Everything sitting in "information requested"
Your oldest stalled applications, and the ones nobody has touched in three weeks.
Every application in that status has a payer waiting on you. Most have been waiting longer than anyone on your team realizes, because a stalled application generates no signal — it simply fails to progress.
Sort by days since last activity. Anything past fourteen days needs a named owner today.
5. The DEA telemedicine inventory
DEA telemedicine prescribing flexibilities expire December 31. The permanent Special Registration rule is under review with a November forecast and no public text.
You cannot prepare for requirements you have not read. You can build the list: which providers hold DEA registrations, in which states, and which of them prescribe controlled substances via telemedicine without in-person evaluation.
That list takes a week to build and will be needed in a hurry.
6. Medicare Advantage directory accuracy
Open enrollment runs through December 7 and directory data is under active scrutiny while members are choosing plans.
Check what payer directories currently display for your MA providers — address, specialty, accepting-patients status — against what should be there. Not what you submitted. What is showing.
7. Annual client reporting
If you produce year-end summaries for clients, assemble the data now. In the first week of January every client wants their report simultaneously, and that is the worst possible week to discover that a report takes two hours to build by hand.
8. Access review
Who has access to what. Staff changed during the year; permissions rarely did.
This is also the moment to check whether anyone who left still has access to anything, which is a question that gets much less comfortable the longer it goes unasked.
9. Next year's payer list
Which panels are you pursuing in Q1. Which are closed. Which have changed requirements.
This is the planning input everyone skips, and it is the reason January credentialing work so often starts with a week of research that could have happened in October.
10. One process you keep working around
Every team has one. The spreadsheet nobody fully trusts. The handoff that always drops something. The report somebody rebuilds by hand every month because the export does not quite work.
Pick one and fix it.
Nine items on this list are operational hygiene — do them and January is calmer. The tenth is the only one that makes next year different from this year.
Start Q1 with the expirables list already built. Start a 30-day free trial: https://credyapp.com/Identity/Account/RegisterDemo — no setup required.