If you started your practice on Headway, Alma or Grow Therapy, you probably did it for a good reason. Getting credentialed with insurance on your own is slow and confusing, and the platforms made it disappear. You signed up, they handled the payers, patients showed up, and you got paid.

That deal is changing. Over the past year we've talked to hundreds of therapists on these platforms, and the same frustrations keep coming up: new per-session fees on referred clients, annual audits of clinical notes, and terms-of-service updates that quietly expand what the platform can do with your name, photo and profile. Each change on its own is small. Together, they add up to a practice you don't fully control.

The good news is that leaving is more doable than most therapists think. This post walks through what you actually get back when you hold your own contracts, why credentialing is the part that keeps people stuck, and the sequence we recommend so you can make the move without a gap in income or a disruption for your patients.

What a platform costs you, beyond the fee

The platforms are convenient because they hold the contracts. That's also the catch. When you bill through Headway, Alma or Grow, the payer contract belongs to the platform, not to you. Your patients are technically their patients in the insurer's system. If you leave, you start from zero.

It also means the platform sets the rate. You get whatever share they pass through, and that share can change. Add a marketplace fee on top and the gap between what the insurer pays and what reaches you keeps widening.

Holding your own contracts flips this. Three things change:

• The contracts are in your name. Every enrollment is under your own NPI and entity. If you change billers, EHRs, or anything else, the contracts come with you.
• You collect the full contracted rate. No platform share, no per-client fee. A biller takes a percentage, but it's a percentage of a bigger number.
• You decide the terms. Which payers, which patients, how you document, what you do with your own likeness. No surprise policy updates.

And you don't have to burn the bridge. Your independent contracts are separate from a platform's, so most providers keep seeing platform patients while their own contracts come through, then move patients over once they're live.

Why most therapists stay stuck

It's not the fee that keeps people on a platform. It's credentialing.

To get your own contracts, you have to gather a dozen documents, build and attest a CAQH profile that's clean enough not to get flagged, fill out a separate 30-page application for each payer, and then chase status updates for months. Payer subsidiaries make it worse: being credentialed with Cigna doesn't automatically cover Evernorth, and United doesn't automatically cover Surest. Miss one and a chunk of your patients' claims won't pay.

For a full-time clinician, that's dozens of hours of admin work with no clear end date. So people put it off, and the platform keeps the contracts.

How Accel Health takes the credentialing off your plate

We built Accel Health to automate exactly this. You upload your documents once, and our system and team do the rest.

Documents and verification. Drop in your NPI, license, malpractice certificate, articles of incorporation, W-9 and the rest, ten files at a time if you like. We verify each one in real time and flag anything expired or expiring, so you're audit-ready before a payer ever asks.

CAQH, done for you. CAQH is the bottleneck in almost every stalled application. We act as your delegate, scrub the profile (taxonomy, addresses, name history, work history), upload your documents and sync it directly from our system. We handle the 90-day attestations too. You don't log in.

Payer applications, auto-filled and submitted. Pick a payer, pick a location, click create. We fill the application and submit it, then show you the live status of every enrollment in one dashboard: submitted, in progress, effective, with the date we last checked. When a contract comes through, it's stored right there with your payer ID.

Billing, if you want it. Keep your EHR (SimplePractice, or whatever you use). We pull your notes, code them, submit through the clearinghouse, check eligibility before each visit, handle prior auths and work every denial. Reimbursements go straight to your bank account, and you get a weekly summary of what was submitted and what was collected.

We already work with a lot of providers leaving these platforms, so we know which payers your patients are on and which subsidiaries need their own enrollment.

A safe way to leave, in four steps

The mistake we see most often is giving notice first and credentialing second. That creates a gap where you can't bill anyone. Do it in this order instead:

1. Pull your payer list from the platform. You already know which insurers your patients use. That list is your credentialing plan.
2. Start credentialing now, while you keep working on the platform. Upload your documents, let us clean up CAQH and submit applications. Commercial payers (Aetna, Cigna, United, Blue Cross) typically go effective in 45 to 90 days. Medicaid, Medicare and Tricare run 120 days or more.
3. Check your platform's notice period. Some now require 60 days. Time your notice so it ends after your own contracts are effective, not before.
4. Move patients once contracts are live. Update the payer IDs in your EHR, bill under your own name, and transition patients over. No gap in care, no gap in income.

For a typical three-payer commercial panel, the whole thing is usually done inside 90 days.

What it costs

If you use Accel Health for billing, credentialing is free, up to 10 payers per provider. Billing is 6% of what we collect for up to $1M a year, 5% from $1M to $2M, and 4% above that, with a $1,000 monthly minimum. There's a small deposit to start credentialing and it's credited back on your first billing invoice.

If you only want credentialing, it's $250 per enrollment and you keep billing however you do today.

Every contract stays in your name either way. If we ever part ways, you export your documents and contract information and carry on.

Ready to look at it?

Bring your payer list from Headway, Alma or Grow and we'll walk you through exactly what your credentialing plan and timeline would look like. Book a demo at accelhealth.ai, or if you have a colleague in the same spot, send them this post.

‍