Trilliant Health touts new provider directory

In a time when consumers are able to easily find information about restaurants, hotels, and other businesses, Hal Andrews says it should be easier to get accurate information about doctors.

Hal Andrews, president and CEO of Trilliant Health, says it's important that the company's new provider directory is free.

Andrews, the president and chief executive officer of Trilliant Health, is hoping to make that a bit easier. Trilliant Health recently launched its Provider Directory application, offering information about more than 2.9 million clinicians nationwide.

The directory is available to the public for free. Andrews tells Chief Healthcare Executive® that he thinks it’s important that everyone should be able to access the directory at no cost.

“In the health economy, we're spending a lot of money and time chasing things that should be free. And so by making it free, hopefully we're doing something to sort of take a hammer to some of that waste that's always in the healthcare system,” Andrews says.

“It isn't logical to me that if you need healthcare, that as a consumer, there should be a paywall for you to find the provider you need,” he says. “And it shouldn't cost you money to figure out where that provider is and whether they take your insurance. And so I just start from sort of the logic of it.”

The target audience for the directory includes, well, everyone, Andrews says, from consumers to insurance companies.

“We're trying to make it easy for anybody, no matter what their use case is, whether it's a consumer, whether it's a payer who needs to update their directory,” Andrews says. “We've made it available in all the ways that we know possible, and the hope is that it'll help people make better decisions.”

Trilliant Health was motivated to develop the directory largely by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which called for such a directory years ago. Several years later, frustrated that it hadn't come together, Andrews says it was time to move forward.

He talks about first broaching the subject with his team at Trilliant Health to gauge if the company could create such a public directory.

“I finally just looked at the team and said, well, what's it take for us to do this?” Andrews recalls. “And as usual, they sort of rolled their eyes and said, ‘You know, it's harder than you think, since you don't really know anything about tech, but yes, we can do it.’”

Andrews says he’s been pleased with the number of people who have accessed the directory.

“We've been pleasantly surprised by not only the number of people who've signed up … but the people, both the companies that they represent and the seniority of the people, including people in the government,” he says.

“It's been health systems, it's been payers, it's been regulators, pharma companies. It's been everybody that you could think of in terms of health economy stakeholders,” he adds. “And so it's been an actual morale boost for the team to see that people care about the products they're building.”

Information in the directory is refreshed every 30 days to ensure that it is as up to date as possible. Andrews acknowledges it’s virtually impossible to make a perfect directory, but he says, “It is a never-ending journey to make it better.”

Some physicians take positions in different organizations, or move to different areas of the country. “I've been surprised at how consistently people are moving around,” Andrews says.

That’s one reason why Trilliant is working to add new information on a regular basis.

“It is important to update this regularly, because people really are moving around more than you think,” Andrews says.