Get paid faster, with less paperwork.
One standardized network path across participating payers — without replacing your EHR.
Prior authorization isn’t the product. It’s the first transaction. The product is shared administrative rails.
The connection.
One connection replaces per-payer portals, faxes, and bilateral integrations: prior authorization from your production activation — with eligibility following on the same connection as it is enabled — claims and remittance as they go live in your market, and each new catalog category after them — all on the same connection. Full participation means moving claims and remittance onto network routes as they arrive.
Three ways to connect — without replacing your EHR
The richest data path — and it reduces dependence on the EHR vendor’s native timeline.
The workflow stays entirely in the EHR, where your clinicians already work.
From the EHR marketplace — the broadest interim path for certified-EHR providers, subject to supported SMART capabilities and marketplace policies.
All three paths terminate at the same standard gateway interface — using a gateway you host or SHN hosts.
And one hosting decision
Run the gateway in your own environment — your infrastructure, your keys. Your IT vendor or systems integrator running it on your behalf is still you-hosting.
SHN operates your gateway as a managed service under your authority — the typical answer for organizations without an integration team.
Partner-hosted arrangements may become available over time.
A small practice without an integration team can use the SHN-hosted path and begin in the cloud sandbox — most providers and EHR teams start there; no production deployment is required to begin, and most deployments require outbound connectivity only. Start testing → · Get Connected →
Prior authorization is the on-ramp. Claims is the destination. Connect once for January, and your network edge is positioned for the April 2027 claims release — claims-path integration and readiness complete on your timeline, when the biggest savings begin.
The price.
Providers pay no SHN connection or onboarding fee. Launch Participants pay no provider utility fee through 2028; later fees follow the published routed-claims schedule (0.05% of aggregate routed paid-claim volume, metered at your own gateway — no individual claim carries a charge). “Free” refers to SHN network fees; EHR-vendor, integrator, and internal costs remain the participant’s. Full pricing →
What it replaces.
The lines your CFO already budgets: eligibility-verification labor, prior-authorization staffing and follow-up (roughly 13 hours per physician-week of combined physician and staff time — AMA), status-check calls, remittance posting and reconciliation, clearinghouse fees and RCM modules, and the rework that follows front-end denials. Billing-and-insurance work has been measured at up to 14.5% of primary-care revenue (JAMA); the network fee is five one-hundredths of one percent of routed claim volume — and nothing at all through 2028 for Launch Participants. Your monthly statement shows the computed fee next to the cost it displaces, from the first month.
Launch Participant terms.
Commit to prior authorization by January 2027 and claims routing at your market’s claims release — no later than January 1, 2028. Pay nothing through 2028, a 0.025% transition rate in 2029, and the published 0.05% from January 1, 2030 — with a monthly statement throughout showing the computed fee alongside the cost it displaces. The window closes December 31, 2026.
Your EHR stays. Keep the systems you have. Connect them to the shared rails.
Getting connected.
Your EHR and the systems you already run stay; you connect through the standard gateway interface — a gateway you host or SHN hosts, with certified partners available for the onboarding and integration work. Onboarding and baseline conformance testing are free — part of the network’s Open Access tier — and in rural-health states, transformation funding can pay for the onboarding work. Start in the sandbox today; prove conformance at a Connectathon. The green conformance result is technical readiness evidence — not production approval by itself. Production activation also requires executed agreements, production credentials, and completed launch checks. Local Test Kit — create a free developer account and see the workflow run on synthetic data in minutes; a reference implementation for testing, not the deployment path. See it work →
This is not an IT project for your practice — certified partners and state funding do the connection work. Your state’s health information exchange, your EHR vendor, and revenue-cycle firms do it using the systems you already run, and states are funding provider onboarding. Eligible providers in participating state programs pay nothing to connect, and Launch Participants pay no SHN fee through 2028. Say yes to the invitation; the network does the rest. Connect directly, or through a certified partner — same network, same rates. →
Per-transaction benchmarks are published third-party figures (CAQH Index; AMA survey data). Results vary by organization, starting cost, route migration, participation levels, and decommissioning timing; whether the network clears your fee is computed from your numbers in a working session, and each participant sees its own computed fee alongside displaced cost on its monthly network statement.