Provider Data Dorks

CertifyOS
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Provider Data Dorks is the podcast for anyone who works with, buys, or builds on provider data. Hosted by Nick Helfrich and Mitch Gorodokin, each episode features the leaders who understand healthcare's most complex invisible problem and are working to fix it. From payer directories to credentialing to interoperability, we get into the real issues, with the people closest to them.

Episodes

  1. 3d ago

    Why Finding a Therapist Is Harder Than Finding a Doctor, with Visar Tasimi

    Over 60 million Americans live with a mental health condition, and about six in ten can’t get consistent access to care. Visar Tasimi’s team gets someone into behavioral health care in an average of four days. He’ll tell you supply is only part of the problem. The bigger part is data. Visar is Senior Vice President of Provider Success and Market Operations at Lucet, where he oversees a network of roughly 60,000 behavioral health providers. Behavioral health breaks the usual assumptions: it is not uncommon for one provider to work for three or four different companies, which multiplies the same record three or four times over and makes all of it harder to keep accurate. In this conversation with Nick Helfrich and Mitch Gorodokin, Visar walks through NavConnect, the work of finding out when a provider is actually free, and the single fix he’d want the whole industry to adopt. In this episode: Why one behavioral health provider working for four companies quadruples the data problemWhat a ghost network actually is, and why it’s almost never maliciousThe four-day speed-to-care number, and what it takes to hit itThe number one filter members search on when choosing a therapistTherapeutic alliance: getting someone into care versus keeping them thereWhy telehealth solved geography and not matchingShared credentialing, and the single source of truth he’d build with a magic wandThe advice his grandmother still calls to check he’s following Subscribe to Provider Data Dorks for the people fixing healthcare’s hardest data problem. New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 03:58 The through line from finance to dental to behavioral health 07:16 What makes finding a behavioral health provider so hard 09:20 Telehealth solved geography, not matching 10:27 One provider, four companies, four times the data 13:54 NavConnect, and finding out when someone is actually free 15:24 The four-day speed-to-care number 17:18 Why licensing letters change from state to state 21:10 The magic bullet he doesn’t have yet 23:55 Therapeutic alliance, and the filter members search first 25:01 Where cash pay fits in 27:57 What a ghost network actually is 32:53 Who is really responsible for accurate data 38:53 Behavioral health and chronic disease 42:17 Closing the loop back to the PCP 45:15 Shared credentialing and a single source of truth 49:06 Nobody went to school to maintain 20 directories 52:30 His honest advice for health plans 1:02:11 Lightning round 1:03:24 His grandmother’s advice

  2. Sep 1

    Every Doctor, Every 90 Days: The 2028 Rule Payers Can't Actually Run | Nick Bernold, J2 Health

    Starting in 2028, every health plan will have to confirm that every doctor in its directory is actually there, every ninety days. Nick Bernold thinks the goal is right and the mechanics are close to impossible. Ten to fifteen payers calling the same practice, reading sixty names down the phone to an office that's booked from opening to closing. His words for what happens next: the practices hang up. He's already testing the workaround, and the week before this recording one of his AI voice agents called a doctor's office and got an AI receptionist. Nick is chief product officer at J2 Health, where he was the first hire in January 2022 and has built the company's provider network analytics and led product ever since. He came to J2 after three years designing network analytics and strategy products at Oscar Health, and started his career in finance at Bridgewater Associates. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth and finished law school at Yale, where he was headed for tax law before healthcare pulled him back. In this episode: • Why network adequacy turned out to be an ops problem before it was a data problem, and what he got wrong walking in with a "data brain" • The gray areas: PDFs from the early 2000s that practitioners will tell you are not remotely how the rules actually work • Why 20 to 40% of doctors listed as in-network have no appointment available inside a two to three month window • The counterintuitive trade-off where tighter time and distance standards hand more leverage, and higher premiums, to consolidated provider groups • What the Real Health Providers Act gets right, and the 90-day verification requirement he doesn't think anyone can operationalize • Secret shopper calls run by AI voice agents, including the one that reached an AI receptionist on the other end • The two directory use cases regulators keep collapsing into one: the existing patient checking coverage and the new patient trying to get in the door • The 1997 cap on CMS-funded residency slots he believes sits upstream of the entire access problem • His one recommendation for network leaders before 2028: consolidate to a single internal source of truth Subscribe to Provider Data Dorks for the people fixing healthcare's hardest data problem. New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

  3. Aug 25

    A Health Plan CEO on How Bad Directory Data Actually Gets, with Eric Galvin

    Eric Galvin has run health plans as both CFO and CEO. At one of them, the directory data was bad enough that regulators raised concerns about whether consumers could actually find care. He says so plainly here, then describes what he found when he went looking: a scary place, with all kinds of scary reasons the data is the way it is, most of them things the industry did to itself. Eric spent nine years at ConnectiCare as CFO and then CEO, served as EVP and chief growth and medical cost officer at EmblemHealth, ran PopHealthCare and Emcara Health as CEO, and was most recently CFO of Geisinger Health Plan. Across thirty years on both the payer and the provider side, his conclusion is that the provider data problem survives for human reasons more than technical ones. It comes down to trust, and to the fact that the people senior enough to fix it are often the least free to describe it out loud. In this conversation with Nick Helfrich and Mitch Gorodokin, his prescription for the whole system comes down to one word: simplify. In this episode: Why well-intentioned incentive design, from stars ratings to quality metrics, can degrade the patient experience it was built to improveWhy stripping out administrative waste still would not make healthcare affordableThe "bill without a price" problem: healthcare's strangest economic quirk"Manage yourself out of a job": his advice to provider data directors seeking executive buy-inWhy he thinks a clearinghouse model, similar to credit reporting, could fix provider data industry-wideWhat racing sports cars and his eye doctor reveal about the consumer data layer healthcare is missingThe colleague with a cancer diagnosis who could barely navigate the system she had worked in her entire career Subscribe to Provider Data Dorks for the people fixing healthcare's hardest data problem. New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

  4. Jul 7

    How 20 Years in Medicine Convinced Him Healthcare Can't Be Fixed (Only Rebuilt)

    Every health-tech company promises AI will make you healthier. Dr. Ankoor Shah says that's not what the technology is actually being built to do. A pediatrician who co-led Washington DC's COVID-19 response and now serves as VP of Clinical Excellence at Included Health, Shah delivers two on-record hot takes: that healthcare technology has historically widened disparities rather than closed them, and that today's AI is funded to optimize the revenue cycle, not patient outcomes. From there, Nick and Mitchell get into the part that actually decides your care: how you find a doctor who's safe, and why the system makes that so hard. Shah explains why the biggest quality gains come from moving people out of the bottom quartile, how doctors with sanctions slip across state lines undetected, and why he himself has no real incentive to keep his data accurate across a dozen health plans. It's a clear-eyed look at where provider data, quality, and AI actually intersect, from someone who has practiced, run public health, and now builds. In this episode: Why Shah says healthcare AI isn't built to make patients healthierThe "history of technology widening disparities" argument, from telehealth to wearablesHow Included Health quantifies provider quality at the individual NPI levelWhy moving patients out of the bottom quartile beats chasing top-tier docsHow sanctioned providers stay in-network across statesThe credentialing burden that leaves directory data permanently staleWhy aligning the member's "mind, body, and wallet" is the real unlock Subscribe to Provider Data Dorks on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

  5. Jun 30

    The 3 Questions This Healthcare CIO Asks Before the Demo Even Starts with Samir Deshpande

    Most health plans manage the invisible backbone of healthcare, provider data, across disconnected systems, spreadsheets, and vendors that don't talk to each other. One bad record cascades downstream into claims, payments, and patients who can't find a doctor. So why do so many plans still try to build their own fix? Sam Deshpande spent 17 years at Capital One in risk and credit, then ran risk, technology, and information at Humana as chief risk officer and later CIO. That makes him the rare leader who has sat on both sides of every buy-vs-build, business-vs-IT fight. In this episode he gives Nick and Mitch a clear rule for what to build, what to buy, and why provider data is the textbook case for buying: complicated, universal, and ruinous to get wrong. Highlights: Why he calls the business-IT divide "two separate nations," and how good leaders close the borderThe three questions he asks about any product before the demo mattersHis rule of thumb: if it's complicated and everyone uses it, buy itWhy "transformational" is overused, and the only two things that earn the wordHow he'd fix provider data from a clean slate as a health plan CEO: decide, declare, designWhere AI genuinely moves provider data, and where teams are kidding themselvesThe $60 shovel story that reframed how he buys AI tools New episodes of Provider Data Dorks every week. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. Hosted by Nick Helfrich and Mitch Gorodokin.

  6. Jun 16

    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 problem Subscribe to Provider Data Dorks for the people fixing healthcare's hardest data problem. New episodes weekly on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

  7. Jun 9

    How a Former $10B Hospital CEO Would Fix Provider Data if He Started Today | Steve Klasko

    Steve Klasko was a DJ named Little Stevie Kent who got into medical school partly because an admissions officer recognized his voice from the radio. He then spent 40 years proving that listening (really listening) separates transformational leaders from the ones who just manage decline. As CEO of Jefferson Health, he took a $1.5 billion system to $10 billion in nine years, fought the FTC, and made enemies in every insurance boardroom in Philadelphia. His method was simple: stop asking lawyers what you're allowed to do. Tell them what you're going to do, and ask them how to defend that action. In this episode: Why Jefferson was "a place where good ideas go to die" and how Klasko changed that by deciding the lawyers worked for him, not the other way aroundThe credentialing nightmare hiding inside every hospital M&A deal, and what those three months of lost revenue actually costWhy healthcare is 15 years behind finance: "We select doctors for organic chemistry grades. Then we're amazed they aren't more empathetic."The MRI pricing story: Klasko called six facilities, asked a simple question, and the last one hung up on himHow defragmenting a hard drive became his mental model for fixing broken provider data infrastructureHis vision for 2031: patients own their data, credentialing happens in milliseconds, and the whole apparatus is a commodityHis one wish for healthcare, told through a Jason Kidd quote about turning things around 360 degreesFollow Provider Data Dorks on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for weekly conversations with the leaders who built the system and the ones rebuilding it. New episodes every Wednesday.

  8. Jun 2

    Why Shared Credentialing Has Failed Every Time (and Why It's Different Now) | Tyler Ford

    Provider data has been called the invisible backbone of healthcare. It drives directories, network adequacy, credentialing, claims… basically everything. And in most organizations, it's still managed through spreadsheets, siloed systems, and a stack of vendors that don't talk to each other. So why hasn't the industry fixed it? Tyler Ford has spent his career at the center of that question, from the Advisory Board to UnitedHealth Group to his current role as SVP of Strategy and Operations at Union Healthcare Insight. He's one of the few people who has seen this problem from every angle: the plan side, the regulatory side, and the advisory side. And in this conversation, he doesn't pull punches. What's covered in the first episode of Provider Data Dorks with Tyler Ford: Why provider data is a definitions problem, a technology problem, and an incentives problem all at once and why that intersection is what makes it so hard to solveThe credentialing standoff: health plans need accuracy and compliance; providers need speed. Why bridging those two priorities has never workedThe one provider data standard that actually succeeded (the CRED App), why it worked, and the lesson the industry hasn't learned from itWhy standards without enforcement are just suggestions and what No Surprises Act implementation taught the industry about accountabilityWhat Tyler calls the "Gordian knot" problem: why shared credentialing isn't one solvable problem but a system of layered complexity in technology, incentives, process, and peopleThe five pillars of CertifyOS's shared credentialing model and why Tyler thinks the conditions to finally make it work are actually hereWhy the shift toward consumer-driven health plans (ICHRA/ECS) is about to make clean provider data mission-critical for health plan survival Subscribe to the show on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

  • 8 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Provider Data Dorks is the podcast for anyone who works with, buys, or builds on provider data. Hosted by Nick Helfrich and Mitch Gorodokin, each episode features the leaders who understand healthcare's most complex invisible problem and are working to fix it. From payer directories to credentialing to interoperability, we get into the real issues, with the people closest to them.

Information

  • Creator
    CertifyOS
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    8
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © CertifyOS
  • Show Website
    Provider Data Dorks