Deployed with the organizations that already serve providers, payers and states.
The network is deployed with the organizations that already serve providers, payers, and states — HIEs, EHR vendors, revenue-cycle firms, MMIS contractors, systems integrators, and other qualified implementation partners. Certified Network Partners do the connection work the rollout requires: provider onboarding, gateway deployment, claims migration, and each new wave of work as the catalog grows.
How partners earn.
Certified Network Partners are paid directly by the states and participants they serve — never through Smart Health Network, which publishes the standards, certifies the work, and takes no share of the revenue. In states funding provider adoption, a Provider Enablement Fund pays certified onboarding partners for each provider connected, against machine-verified connection milestones: payment follows verified completion, not proposals or hours. And the work recurs — every quarterly transaction release, every new participant wave, every new state that joins runs on certified-partner delivery.
Who should certify: health information exchanges; EHR and practice-management vendors onboarding their own installed base — the highest-leverage path in the program; revenue-cycle firms; systems integrators and interoperability specialists. Certification is free, and the first certified partners will be on the approved list when states choose who does the January 2027 work.
Certification.
The Network Partner Certification Program opens this summer — four tracks: market activation, participant onboarding, credentialing pathways, and gateway operation. Certification is free — no certification fees, and no cap on the number of certified partners. Certification is a conformance test against published standards: it buys no exclusivity, no routing rights, no priority — and the delivery revenue is the partner’s. The first certified partners will be on the approved list when states choose who does the January 2027 work.
The program is the Certified Network Partner program; its four tracks are market activation, participant onboarding, credentialing pathways, and gateway operation. When state pages say Certified Onboarding Partners, that’s the onboarding track — the one state Provider Enablement Funds pay.
What certification requires. Certified Network Partners demonstrate gateway deployment, participant onboarding, credentialing workflow, conformance testing, a production-support process, no-PHI sandbox handling, and signed implementation attestations.
How it works in practice. A state creates a Provider Enablement Fund. A certified partner connects a rural practice, runs the conformance check, produces a machine-verifiable go-live certificate, and invoices the state against the published milestone. Payment follows verified completion.
Partners are paid by the states and participants they serve. The network publishes reference prices and never sits in the money flow.