How This Founder Exposed Healthcare's Most Broken Provider Data (and Why It Matters) with Ron Urwongse

Finding an in-network doctor shouldn't take twenty phone calls. But provider directories (the invisible backbone of healthcare) are wrong so often that the best payers in the country top out at 70% accuracy, and the worst sit at 30%.Most people assume that gap is a mystery. Ron Urwongse proved it's measurable.Ron is the co-founder of Defacto Health and former innovation and strategy lead at CAQH. When CMS mandated that insurers publish their provider directory data through public APIs, he did something almost nobody else did: he read them. All 150 of them. By aggregating those feeds and scoring where payers agree and disagree, Defacto turned one of healthcare's messiest problems into something you can actually put a number on.In this conversation with hosts Nick Helfrich and Mitch Gorodokin, Ron breaks down why cleaning data upstream beats patching it downstream, why "single source of truth" might not save us, and the surprisingly human reasons good directories go bad.Why payer directory accuracy ranges from 30% to 70% and what separates the twoHow consensus scoring across 150 payers reveals which addresses are actually rightThe dropdown-menu mistake quietly generating thousands of directory errorsWhy health systems often hold better data than the payers publishing itWhat the No Surprises Act, MA Plan Finder, and Real Health Providers Act mean for youHow Defacto audits insurers using nothing but the data those insurers publishRon's rule for building anything that lasts: fall in love with the problemSubscribe to Provider Data Dorks for the people fixing healthcare's hardest data problem. New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.