It was a hard-fought battle with many worthy companies working their hardest to publish their massive negotiated rates data out to the world so they could be in compliance with Price Transparency laws by last July. Getting this data together, cleaning it up at scale, and publishing it to the world was no small task, especially when one considers the lengths these companies went to tread the line between compliance and obscurity so that the data was technically available, but virtually unusable.
And we get it - if we had to open source our Payerset algorithms, which contain the intellectual property we have built to parse this data, we would probably make it pretty tough to use too. After all, that IP represents thousands of hours of time and many, many dollars invested into our platform to make it what it is today.
Still, some of the techniques used by these companies like Elevance, Aetna, United Healthcare, are nothing short of impressive. And we thought that deserved some recognition. So without further ado...
For Largest Individual Files, the Award Goes To...
Elevance! Wow, did you have some big files, especially those Provider References and their many permutations, *chef's kiss* Congratulations on all of your hard work to get your huge data out there!
For Longest Time to Parse, Award Goes To...
Aetna! It was neck-and-neck with United up until the last few hours, but you edged them out in the end with an impressive 204 hours of total parsing time. Way to go!
For Overall Biggest PITA, the Award Goes To...
Humana - you know what you did, and you should be proud. Your files required the most creative solution to scale parsing your nearly 11 million individual files. Thank goodness for serverless compute! You even managed to pop a random giant Cigna file into your table of contents for some reason, so extra points for that!
Honorable Mentions
Of course, some companies didn't win an award, but we still want to mention payers like Cigna, all the regional Blue Cross payers, and United Healthcare, who came so close on all of the categories. Remember, there's always next month!
Well done everyone, congratulations!
We look forward to the new challenges we will see now that we have published this blog post and informed these companies that they should change their strategy.
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