Credentialing

CAQH ProView for Dietitians: Setup, Attestation, and the Errors That Stall Credentialing

A dietitian's guide to CAQH ProView: account setup, required documents, the 120-day attestation cycle, and the profile errors that silently stall credentialing.

By Alva Health Team · Published July 12, 2026 · ← All articles

Somewhere between "I submitted my credentialing application" and "I have an effective date," there's a database you've maybe never logged into deciding whether anything moves at all. That database is CAQH ProView — and for most stalled RD credentialing applications, the payer isn't slow. The CAQH profile is broken, and nobody sent a notification.

Payers rarely tell you why your file is sitting. They pull your CAQH profile, find an expired attestation or an unexplained work-history gap, and simply wait. Sixty days later you call, they say "pending verification," and the clock keeps running on a problem you could fix in ten minutes if anyone had named it.

This guide covers what CAQH is, how to set it up right the first time, and the five specific errors that quietly stall dietitian credentialing.

What CAQH is and why every payer pulls from it

CAQH ProView is a centralized credentialing database, free for providers, used by the large majority of commercial payers. Instead of sending your license, liability certificate, and work history to every payer separately, you maintain one profile and authorize payers to pull from it. When a payer runs primary source verification during credentialing, CAQH is where they look first.

The design is genuinely good for you — one profile instead of ten paper applications. The catch is that it inverts responsibility: the profile is yours to keep current, and any staleness blocks every payer at once.

Setting up your profile: the walkthrough

1. Register. Some providers get invited by a payer with a CAQH ID; RDs can also self-register on the CAQH ProView site. Use an email you'll still check in five years — this account outlives jobs, addresses, and payers.

2. Gather documents before you start. The profile takes an hour if you have everything and a week if you're hunting for PDFs mid-form:

3. Enter work history with no gaps. This is the section that burns people. Payers expect a continuous work history (commonly the last 5–10 years), and any gap — often anything over about 6 months — needs an explanation in the profile. "Parental leave," "full-time graduate study," "relocation" all count as explanations. A gap with no explanation doesn't get rejected; it gets queried, or worse, silently parked.

4. Practice locations. Enter your actual service address — the one on your payer applications and your NPI record. Consistency across systems matters more than any individual value: payers match your CAQH address, application address, W-9, and NPI record against each other, and mismatches read as discrepancies to investigate.

5. Upload the documents, then attest. Attestation is you formally signing that the profile is accurate. An un-attested profile is invisible to payers — complete doesn't count, attested counts.

6. Authorize payer access. In the authorization settings, either allow all payers that request access ("global" authorization) or grant it payer-by-payer. If you choose payer-by-payer, remember that every new application needs a matching authorization — a missing one is a classic invisible stall.

The 120-day heartbeat: attestation

CAQH requires re-attestation roughly every 120 days, forever, even when nothing changed. Miss it and your profile shows as expired to every payer simultaneously — which stalls new applications and can hold up re-credentialing with networks you're already in.

CAQH sends reminder emails, but they land in inboxes people stopped checking. Don't rely on them:

• Set a recurring calendar event every 110 days: "Attest CAQH" (10 minutes).
• Re-attest immediately after any real change — new address, new liability policy, new entity.

The classic stalls, and their fixes

If your credentialing has gone quiet, check these five in order. They account for most CAQH-related stalls:

1. Expired attestation. The most common by far. Log in, review, re-attest. Then email the payer that the profile is current — don't assume they'll re-pull promptly on their own.

2. Missing or expired malpractice dates. The liability section needs a current face sheet with visible effective/expiration dates and limits. Policies renew annually; profiles don't update themselves. Every renewal, upload the new face sheet and re-attest. An expired policy on file reads, to a payer, as an uninsured provider.

3. Unexplained work-history gaps. The query about your 2022 gap doesn't always reach you — sometimes the file just waits. Pre-empt it: explain every gap in the profile before any payer has to ask.

4. Wrong or inconsistent practice address. You applied with your new office address; CAQH still has your old apartment. To the payer's matching logic, that's a discrepancy, not a typo. Align CAQH, the application, the W-9, and your NPPES record to the same address, then re-attest.

5. Payer not authorized. You applied, but the payer can't open your profile because access was never granted. Check the authorization list against every payer you have in flight.

The pattern in all five: the failure is silent. Build the habit of logging into CAQH whenever a credentialing application passes the 30-day mark with no news — it's the first place to look, and the only one you fully control.

Your CAQH maintenance calendar

Fifteen minutes a quarter, and CAQH stops being the reason anything is stuck.

How Alva helps: CAQH gets you into networks — Alva makes the networks worth it. Once you're credentialed, Alva handles the daily grind those contracts create: benefits verification, charting, coding, claim submission, and payment posting, all for $99/month. Start a 7-day free trial.