The Digital Health 150: The most promising digital health companies of 2022

A look at what the REAL Health Providers Act, the first national law to grade provider directory accuracy, reveals about the operational, regulatory, and budget pressures shaping network management for the next decade.

Provider directories are implicitly built around two different users, the New Patient seeking first access to care and the Existing Patient checking network status, and regulations like the REAL Act rarely state which one they're actually serving.

Testing four hypotheses for why hospital roster removals propagate to payer directories nearly twice as often as additions, J2 Health found credentialing lag, availability filtering, cost steerage, and network sculpting each explain only a small piece of the "hidden network" puzzle.