Implementing an Industry-Wide Provider Directory Accuracy Tool

The Challenge

In the healthcare industry, provider directories are notoriously inaccurate. This negatively impacts a breadth of stakeholders, and has elicited responses ranging from member frustration to federal regulation. As part of an industry push to address this problem, a national non-profit organization rolled out an updated version of their provider directory solution. This complex, multi-stakeholder, industry-wide solution required both the non-profit organization staff and the customers (payers) to work in an unfamiliar file format with a brand new data set.

Our Approach

crankfrog was engaged to drive implementation of this provider directory solution by facilitating inter-departmental interactions, creating business rules, and modifying internal processes. crankfrog’s objectives at the outset were to efficiently implement the updated provider directory solution with as many customers as possible, and then train the newly-hired permanent implementation manager to transition the tasks associated with continuing implementation and maintaining already-implemented solutions.

crankfrog worked with each payer customer throughout the engagement to ensure they understood the product specifications, correctly interpreted the data, and accurately identified the new solution’s impact to the business. crankfrog also helped each payer customer create business rules for consuming the data, and assisted with the development of provider engagement plans to ensure that participating providers were actively involved. This included creating project plans, holding daily implementation meetings with payer customers, reporting implementation status, and working across the non-profit’s departments (including product, technology, account management, operations, and others) to ensure a smooth implementation. To round out the engagement, crankfrog created an implementation playbook complete with the implementation process, best practices, templates, specifications, user guides, project plans, and a library of frequently-asked questions and answers to aid in the successful transition to the non-profit’s internal team.


crankfrog helped the nonprofit increase directory accuracy for many of the payer customers by successfully implementing the new provider directory solution at multiple payer customers and setting them up with an ongoing, repeatable process. This implementation will drive long-term impact and lead to less customer frustration with inaccurate provider directories, which could lead to downstream benefits such as better customer satisfaction rates, or even greater customer retention for payers.