As we've previously explored on this blog, the landscape of healthcare price transparency is far from uniform. While some payers are more like fortresses with moats and firewalls, others are making strides in becoming veritable libraries of information. Today, we're shining a spotlight on a few industry leaders who are making life easier for everyone in the ecosystem.
Aetna: The Old Guard Improves Yet Again
Aetna has long been at the forefront of providing clean, accessible data. While their files are undeniably massive, they are providing everything required of them by CMS right on their monthly cadence as expected - truly a model in the price transparency space!
United: A Comeback Story
We've got to give credit where credit is due. United has made major progress in ensuring their data is both accessible and parseable. Gone are the days of blocked drives and firewall gymnastics. Today, their JSON files are (mostly) clean and accessible, meeting industry standards and making life that much easier for data engineers and analysts alike.
Elevance: Growing Pains But Getting There
Elevance (formerly Anthem) has been improving their data accessibility and cleanliness, though of the major payers, they are still laggards in terms of ensuring file availability. Recently, they upped the ante by dropping about 3 dozen files that are over 1 terabyte in size—each with more than 20 billion records. To be honest, it threw us for a loop initially, requiring a revamp of our parsing process and some additional compute/memory, but we managed to make it work with just about 30 extra hours of parsing time.
Size Matters, but So Does Quality
What we're seeing across the board is a trend toward not just more data, but better data. While the volumes are shooting up—requiring some extra computational muscle—so is the quality of the information. This isn't just a win for us at Payerset, but for businesses and consumers who can make more informed decisions faster.
How Payerset Makes It Easier
If this talk of terabytes and JSON files sounds intimidating, fret not. Payerset is designed to help you operationalize this ever-growing wealth of data swiftly and efficiently. Our technology leverages cloud computing and cutting-edge parsing algorithms to ensure you're never left in the data dust.
The trend is clear: healthcare data is becoming more voluminous, but also cleaner and more useful than ever before. It's an exciting time for anyone invested in the democratization of price transparency data.