Trilliant Health, a healthcare analytics company, announced it will make its national provider directory publicly available.
The directory, the result of years of data science and engineering work, is said to contain data on 2.7 million healthcare facilities, physicians and allied health professionals. It will be accessible via an API and will be supported by open-source libraries to enable third-party development and analysis.
Basic access to the API will be available for free, while premium licensing will be available for specific use cases, like consumer applications or advanced analyses. The new access can help users improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of their own provider directories, stream information about providers into consumer-facing applications or analyze physician behaviors and referral patterns to improve network performance or build networks, the company said.
“Our provider directory is our most important and valuable asset, and it is foundational to everything we do," Hal Andrews, CEO for Trilliant Health, said in a press release. "By opening access to our provider directory, we aim to drive innovation across the industry—from providers and health plans to employers and digital health entrepreneurs—to equip Americans with the information needed to make better decisions about our healthcare system."
The Trilliant directory was created by applying advanced algorithms to its proprietary claims dataset, which contains medical and pharmacy claims for more than 300 million Americans. To date, Trilliant has generated more than 65 million new data points in its provider directory and has corrected more than 2 million provider data points, like addresses and taxonomies, found in public data sources like Physician Compare.
“A dynamic provider directory is the starting point to answering the most basic questions about healthcare providers,” Andrews added. “With an increasing focus on price transparency, understanding provider-level details is essential.”
The announcement comes after the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) indicated an interest in creating a centralized, nationwide directory of healthcare providers and services. Last fall, CMS said it envisions such a directory as a resource for patients seeking specific information like a provider’s spoken language or to compare health plan networks. It could also support providers and payers by helping keep health information up to date.
"I cannot overstate the complexity involved in building this dataset," Deepesh Chandra, chief analytics officer for Bon Secours Mercy Health and a member of Trilliant's board, said of the company's data in the announcement. "To replicate the provider directory at scale would be challenging, if not impossible, for most other industry participants. It would require an enormous investment, not only in data and compute power but also in the engineering talent to make sense of a dataset of that scale."