Surprise! Doctor search tool for California exchange encounters delay
October 03, 2013
If you regularly see a doctor that you love, you'll of course want to determine whether that doctor is in-network for any new insurance plan that you're considering. After all, continuing to receive treatment from an out-of-network doctor can mean some rather large medical bills. With that in mind, it's easy to see why officials would want to reassure users of the individual exchange that they would be able to easily determine the network status of any insurance plans that they are considering. Unfortunately, Los Angeles Times reported that despite having "touted the feature [doctor search tool] when enrollment began," the feature would not be ready until Monday or beyond.
We ourselves have found it difficult to get accurate and comprehensive data regarding which doctors accept which plans. While insurance companies have that information and even make it publicly available on their corporate websites, insurance companies generally do not make the information available through other channels. For example, most insurance companies' doctor finder websites ask that search engine "robots" (like the ones that we send out) not crawl their directories. At the same time, insurance companies' doctor finder applications tend to lack meaningful information used by patients to select a provider. What ends up happening is that online doctor directories end up with inaccurate or incomplete information, and patients end up needing to research multiple sites in order to triangulate. Which leads me to wonder: just why do insurance companies hold provider network information so tightly?