The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) consolidated eight separate provider directories into a single national directory, a move agency officials estimate could eliminate roughly $6 billion in annual healthcare administrative costs.
Amy Gleason, acting administrator of the U.S. DOGE Service and strategic advisor to CMS, discussed the effort on June 11 during the Government Service Delivery conference in Washington, D.C.. She described it as part of a broader push to improve healthcare data quality and interoperability.
According to Gleason, the fragmented provider directory environment created inconsistent data across CMS systems and increased costs throughout the healthcare sector.
“You can imagine that CMS did not have very good information when every version of the provider directory had different data,” Gleason said.
“When you’re trying to go figure out who you need to work with or how to find fraud, you have eight versions of the truth,” she added.
CMS has now consolidated those directories into a single source of provider information. Gleason said the agency estimates the previous system generated about $6 billion annually in administrative costs because provider data had to be continuously verified across multiple systems.
Gleason previewed the consolidated national provider directory in February at an ACT-IAC event in Reston, Va.
“It’s still too hard for patients to get their information, it’s still too hard for doctors to get the right information,” Gleason said at the February event.
To build trust in data exchange, she said in February that CMS is implementing interoperable digital identity verification tools, including ID.me and Login.gov, so patients and providers can securely validate who is accessing medical records.
At this week’s conference, Gleason also highlighted continued growth in CMS’s health technology ecosystem initiative, which aims to improve data interoperability in healthcare.
“We launched that last summer with 60 companies, and we have over 800 organizations now participating in this ecosystem, and over 120 are live today,” she added.
The main goal, Gleason said, “is to give patients access to their medical data and modern tools, so they can use that, including AI on top of that.”