Network Adequacy Standards and Enforcement
Health plan networks affect patient access to care. This brief reviews options for setting and enforcing network adequacy standards and tools for making differences in plan networks more transparent.
The independent source for health policy research, polling, and news.
KFF’s policy research provides facts and analysis on a wide range of policy issues and public programs.
KFF designs, conducts and analyzes original public opinion and survey research on Americans’ attitudes, knowledge, and experiences with the health care system to help amplify the public’s voice in major national debates.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the organization’s core operating programs.
Health plan networks affect patient access to care. This brief reviews options for setting and enforcing network adequacy standards and tools for making differences in plan networks more transparent.
This analysis for the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker uses claims data from private, large employer-based plan to examine trends in complexity coding across outpatient practice settings from 2004 to 2021. It finds a trend toward higher complexity codes that contributes to higher outpatient spending.
What does AI mean for patients in bed and doctors at the bedside? Host Chip Kahn and guest Dr. Robert Wachter, Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, discuss whether AI will produce a different kind of doctor in the future — a “clinician curator rather than a clinician-diagnostician.” The answer could define the future of medicine and the doctor-patient relationship.
How is AI applied to clinical care and hospital operations across a real health system at full scale? Chip Kahn talks to Dr. Michael Schlosser, Senior Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer at HCA Healthcare, about how AI is developed for everyday use, starting with careful testing and customization, with clinicians and nurses engaged from the very beginning as end users.
How can AI determine who gets matched to new therapies, who is identified for clinical trials, and how patient tracking is scaled across large populations? Chip is joined by Dr. A.J. Blood, a practicing cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of AIwithCare, a startup company that delivers AI-enabled solutions for research, clinical operations, and patient care. They discuss the role of AI in identifying patients for clinical trials…
How do we know if AI use in health care actually makes patients better? Chip talks with Dr. David Bates — a veteran physician leader at Mass General Brigham and the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Co-director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics Learning Systems — about measuring patient outcomes reliably and in real time to create a strong foundation for everything else in health care administration — clinical deployment, payment reform, consumer…
In this episode, Dr. Ziad Obermeyer joins Chip to talk about AI bias in patient management, including how far the health care industry has come since his groundbreaking research that revealed alarming biases in a widely used algorithm that underestimated the health needs of Black patients.
Caroline Pearson, executive director of the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) and the Peterson Center on Healthcare, joins Chip to discuss who really benefits as AI moves into health care's back office. A quiet arms race is underway — providers deploying AI to code, bill, and capture revenue and insurers deploying it right back to review, deny, and hold the line. The open question is whether any of this lowers what the country actually spends…
This analysis highlights key findings about the health care experiences of older adults (ages 65 and older) based on KFF’s 2023 Survey on Racism, Discrimination, and Health, including variations by race and ethnicity.
A new analysis and chart collection finds that the U.S. has fewer hospital beds and practicing physicians per capita than many similarly large and wealthy countries with health care systems already strained by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Compared to Italy and Spain, two countries in which hospitals have already been overwhelmed by an influx of COVID-19 patients, the U.S. has fewer practicing physicians per capita - 2.6 per 1,000 people, compared to 4.0 in Italy…
© 2026 KFF