The Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare, owned by major health insurers, is rebranding to DataSpring, powered by CAQH.
The company serves as a healthcare data ecosystem for payers and providers. Despite its transition from nonprofit status earlier in 2026, CEO Sarah Ahmad said the rebrand is not tied to that change. She told Becker’s DataSpring wanted to adopt a “fresh, energized” angle, especially when considering provider relationships.
Throughout the brainstorming process, the team planned to have “data” in the name, she told Becker’s. She added that her team had two ways of interpreting the second part it landed on, “spring”: a water spring with data flowing and a physical spring that can adapt to the industry.
“Now is the time for us to show up as a different organization, an organization that truly cares about improving the experience and the burden of providers, and also ensuring that providers or members don’t have any hassles related to their claims payment,” she said.
CAQH has been operating for more than 25 years, maintains more than 4.8 million provider-sourced records and links eligibility information for more than three-quarters of covered patients in the U.S. Ms. Ahmad said CAQH has historically been viewed as an “old-school industry utility.” And while she does not reject that characterization, she would like the company “to be seen as the solver.”
While she said nothing is changing operationally for the company with the rebrand, data quality is its current major area of focus. DataSpring wants to deliver its highest-quality data record by the end of the year, which will then be made available to customers. DataSpring is aiming to avoid provider data entry mistakes, verify information across sources, support accurate directories and ultimately improve the patient experience. Ms. Ahmad said the goal is to ensure that patients do not “drive to an office because they have an appointment scheduled, and they put in the map what they thought to be the address, and they go to the wrong place.”
The company announced the rebrand as AHIP26 kicks off. At the conference, DataSpring plans to share more details about the update and its upcoming provider data collective.
“We’re going to pull together a lot of organizations and entities that care about this, and we’re going to set a data quality standard for the country that everybody can use,” Ms. Ahmad said. “We have a framework, but we also want to work together to get to the best framework, so we can all adopt it.”
Health plans originally founded CAQH, and the restructuring earlier this year includes UnitedHealth Group, Centene, Aetna, Elevance Health, Cigna, Humana and a handful of Blues plans as shareholders. A previous news release said the change would allow CAQH to further advance products and interoperability.
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