The federal government wants to create a national directory that houses accurate, up-to-date information for all doctors and providers across the country — an ambitious attempt to rectify the plethora of error-riddled directories that are maintained by health insurance companies.
The pitch is straightforward: Instead of loading telephone numbers, addresses, and insurance information into dozens of different systems for different insurers, as doctors currently do, providers instead log into a “centralized data hub” and put in all of their information through there. That data then would be available to federal insurance programs and private insurers to craft their own directories.
“We believe that providers and their staff would be more likely to keep a single [national directory] updated, and verify it more frequently, thus improving accuracy,” federal officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a document released Wednesday. “The effort required to update and maintain these numerous and varied directories presents a significant burden across the health care industry, and we continue to see challenges with data availability and accuracy.”
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