EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Finding an in-network doctor shouldn't take twenty phone calls. But provider directories are wrong so often that the best payers top out around 70% accuracy, and the worst sit near 30%. Most people treat that gap as a mystery. Ron Urwongse measured it. Ron is the co-founder of Defacto Health and a former innovation and strategy lead at CAQH. When CMS required insurers to publish their directory data through public APIs, he read them. All 150 of them. By scoring where payers agree and disagree, Defacto turned one of healthcare's messiest problems into a number. In this conversation, Ron explains why fixing data upstream beats patching it downstream, and the surprisingly human reasons good directories go bad.

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