Welcome to Ribbon’s Change Log! Our team is always enhancing our data platform with you in mind, and we’ll use this space to share a roundup of the features we’ve rolled out and improvements we've made over the past month.

Provider Directory

Improved provider specialties

We’ve made it easier for users to find the right type of clinician for a patient’s care needs by kicking off a chain of improvements to our provider specialties field. This month, we populated specialties for providers who previously didn’t have one and removed inaccurate or nonsensical specialty types.

As a result, ~100K providers now have a newly-populated specialty or a more accurate specialty designation (e.g., “cardiologist” instead of “specialist” as their specialty designation).

Improved provider practice name

We’ve improved the reliability of provider practice names (aka the provider.location field). We did this by improving the granularity of practice names (e.g., “Emory University Urology” instead of “Emory University Hospital”), removing low accuracy data points, and adding 70+ sources of provider name data to inform naming.

As a result, we’ve seen an 11% improvement in accuracy of provider practice names to date.

Improved provider data hygiene

We’ve invested in optimizing the search experience by prioritizing a handful of data clean-up initiatives to remove nonsensical data points and address outstanding bugs.

Specific data hygiene improvements include:

1. Removal of duplicate phone numbers
2. Optimization of languages spoken to top 5 languages only
3. Optimization of provider degrees (e.g., a provider can no longer have both MD and DO degrees listed; instead, the most probable degree will be surfaced.)
4. Removal of non-English characters
5. Normalization of provider ratings that were not in our standard 1-10 range

Locations Directory

Improved locations tagging with claims-supplemented logic

We’ve improved data quality of select location types (i.e., Ambulatory Surgery Center, Pharmacy, Physical Therapy, Urgent Care) by supplementing our current methodology with claims data to increase granularity and reduce noise. This will help users to direct patients to specific service locations, such as locations within a hospital or health system campus.

We saw the following accuracy rates for location types supplemented with claims logic:

Insurance Coverage

Added new insurance carriers

We’ve increased the breadth of data available under our Insurance Coverage product by adding the following high-priority carriers:

• Ambetter From Wellcare of Kentucky
• Ambetter From Wellcare of New Jersey
• Ambetter of Alabama
• Hamaspik
• Michigan Medicaid
  • Aetna
  • BCBS of Michigan
  • McLaren Health Plan
  • Molina Healthcare
  • UnitedHealthcare
  • Upper Peninsula Health Plan
  • Wellcare
• Nascentia
• Unum vision
• Humana dental

Improved out-of-state search for BCBS insurances

We’ve improved our out-of-state search for BCBS insurances by implementing functionality that automatically surfaces more in-network providers and locations when searching out of state. This is now default behavior, as it reflects real-life in-network options when searching for out-of-state care.

If you’d like to turn off this functionality for any reason, refer to our API's blue_card parameter documentation for Providers and Locations.