How to Give Your Biller Access to Your Medi-Cal PAVE Account

Rather than managing Medi-Cal enrollment yourself, Bomi can handle Medi-Cal enrollment and billing for you — so you can get back to seeing clients sooner.

If you run a therapy practice in California and you've brought on a biller or credentialing service, there's one small technical step standing between them and your Medi-Cal enrollment: getting them into your PAVE account.

Unlike some payers, the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) does not accept a signed authorization letter or a paper form for this. Access to PAVE is granted entirely inside the portal, by you, and it takes about two minutes. This guide walks you through exactly how to do it, which role to pick, and what your biller can (and can't) do once they're in.

What Is PAVE?

PAVE (Provider Application and Validation for Enrollment) is DHCS's online portal for everything related to Medi-Cal fee-for-service enrollment: new applications, adding clinicians to a group, address changes, and revalidations. If you're enrolled in Medi-Cal, or in the middle of enrolling, your enrollment lives in a PAVE Business Profile tied to your practice. Your biller needs to be added as a user on that profile to work on your behalf.

Why There's No Paper Authorization Form

Providers often ask their biller for "the form I need to sign" to hand over PAVE access. It doesn't exist. The only paper instrument DHCS offers, the Delegated Officials form (DHCS 5263), is limited to people with an ownership interest in the practice or W-2 employees, and it only grants authority to sign affiliation paperwork. An outside billing company can't use it, and it wouldn't grant portal access anyway.

And to be clear: sharing your own PAVE login with your biller is not the answer either. DHCS's intended model is that each person has their own login, you invite your biller into your Business Profile with an appropriate role, and anything that requires a signature is still e-signed by you.

How to Invite Your Biller (About 2 Minutes)

• Log in to PAVE. Go to https://pave.dhcs.ca.gov/ and sign in with your own account.

• Open User Administration. From the top navigation, choose My Tools, then User Administration.

• Click Invite User. Enter your biller's name, email address, and phone number.

• Choose the role. For a biller or credentialing service, choose Manager (more on roles below).

• Send the invite. Your biller gets an email with a link. If they don't have a PAVE account yet, the same link lets them create one — no separate signup needed first.

Which Role Should You Give Your Biller?

PAVE roles range from view-only up to full control of the profile. The ones that matter for this decision:

• Administrator — full control, including adding and removing users and viewing sensitive documents. Keep this role for yourself (and consider a trusted second Administrator, so the profile is never stranded if one person loses access).

• Manager — can prepare, submit, and track applications, but can't manage users. This is the right role for a biller or credentialing service.

• Staff / User / Guest — lighter roles for viewing or data entry without submission rights.

• Signer — e-sign rights. Signing authority stays with the provider or an officer of the practice, so this isn't a role you hand to an outside biller.

What Your Biller Can and Can't Do Once They're In

With a Manager role, your biller can build your enrollment application (or your group's applications), upload documents, respond when DHCS sends back a deficiency notice, submit supplemental changes, and track everything in the Applications queue.

What they can't do is sign for you. California regulations require the provider — a sole proprietor, partner, or corporate officer — to legally bind the application. In practice this works smoothly: your biller prepares the application and PAVE notifies you when your e-signature is needed. You log in, review, and sign. That's the entire division of labor.

The Other Route: Approving a Request to Join

If the invite flow is awkward for any reason, there's a mirror-image option: your biller enters your NPI while setting up their PAVE access, PAVE detects that a Business Profile already exists for it, and offers them a "request to join." The request lands with your profile's Administrator (you), who approves it and sets the role. Same destination, opposite direction.

One thing you can't do is have your biller create a second, parallel profile for your practice — PAVE blocks an NPI from living in two Business Profiles. Invite or request-to-join are the only two doors in.

Why This Two-Minute Task Matters

Medi-Cal enrollment is the foundation for a lot more than fee-for-service billing. California's managed care plans — IEHP, Molina, Health Net, L.A. Care, and the rest — are required to verify your Medi-Cal enrollment before you can join their networks. Once your biller is inside PAVE, they can keep your DHCS application moving, catch deficiency notices before deadlines slip, and keep the managed care applications that depend on it on track.

Send the invite, and your part is mostly done — from there, your job is just to e-sign when PAVE pings you. If you'd rather have all of this handled end to end, from PAVE to the managed care plans to the claims themselves, that's exactly what Bomi does for therapy practices.