This month, Serif Health digs deeper into United Healthcare's MRF files posted since last August. While UHC 'complies' with the price transparency rules with their postings, United Healthcare is systematically reducing the data in those postings, and for a common use case, 70% fewer prices can be located in their files than were accessible in August. This reduction in data volume means in-network providers' rates can no longer be located in the MRF, and this is happening in every nationwide network file posted by UHC. If these data reductions continue, UHC TiC postings will become effectively useless. Read on for more!

If you’re paying attention to healthcare news, you probably saw the recent posting in Fierce Healthcare about a report from Georgetown University stating that “many of the data files are far too large to access without help from a supercomputer.”We’re happy to report that simply is not accurate. You don’t need a supercomputer, you just need Serif Health. We’ve custom engineered a data pipeline to work with and extract data from the most complex payer files in the country quickly and cost-effectively, and our extractor can run on any hardware - even a laptop.

Serif Health continues to examine and refine data to identify quality issues, reduce noise, and ensure our customers can make great decisions with trustworthy information. Key learnings and highlights for December: Taxonomy filtering is now available in our price dashboard and APIs, we found schema misuse leading to millions of ambiguous data points, and erroneous modifiers and TINs are present in various payer MRFs. Read on for more details.

Hi folks! We’re back from HLTH, where the interest and excitement around the payer price transparency data was palpable. We wanted to give folks a November update on our MRF processing tips and tricks post... the TL;DR is that payers were responsive to feedback from MRF data processors like ourselves, and the MRF data is getting (slightly) easier to work with and understand. Read on for details!

Having trouble with Humana, Cigna, or Anthem MRF ingestion? Confused by the rates and place of service codes you're seeing in the file? In this post, we’ll lay out some of the key learnings and gotchas from our past few months of MRF processing, so you and your team don’t have to learn the hard way (like we did). ‍

We get lots of outreach from folks who'd like to spot check an individual rate for price transparency purposes. You've probably heard there’s these Machine Readable Files out there that have this information. So, how do you get to the specific data you need? Let’s walk down the chain together, and learn about the different components of MRF postings (and health insurance networks) along the way.