About this project

People choose health plans based on provider directories that are often wrong. The proof sits in the insurers' own mandated files. This project reads those files every month and publishes what they show.

Why

Secret-shopper studies keep finding that most mental health providers listed in insurance directories can't actually be booked. Researchers who called 2,152 verified mental health counselor listings across every carrier in Pennsylvania's 2024 marketplace got an appointment with only 14.9 percent of them, and 56.6 percent of the listings had the wrong phone number. An earlier survey of all four Maryland marketplace carriers found 57 percent of 1,154 listed psychiatrists were unreachable, and only 14 percent were accepting new patients within 45 days.

Federal rules already require every insurer selling plans on HealthCare.gov to post its full directory in a format CMS specifies (45 CFR 156.230(c)), and CMS guidance requires that machine-readable file to be refreshed at least monthly. CMS's own reviews of these files found that across plan years 2017 to 2021, only 29 to 47 percent of sampled provider records were fully accurate when CMS called to verify them. CMS reported those results by anonymous sample ID rather than naming issuers, and it has not published a summary report since 2022, though the same testing continues inside its annual marketplace compliance reviews. That report is public, and it is the closest precedent for this project.

Beginning with plan years starting on or after January 1, 2029, CMS must post provider directory accuracy scores for network-based Medicare Advantage plans in a machine-readable file, under section 6220 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, which enacted the REAL Health Providers Act. The plans calculate those scores themselves using a method CMS specifies. Marketplace enrollees get nothing equivalent. This project fills that gap now. It audits every federal marketplace issuer's mandated directory file each month, in public, with the evidence attached, starting with mental health.

Who

Ghost Network Watch is built and operated by Soorena Sasani, a cloud solutions architect, as an independent public-interest project. It is independent of CMS and of the insurers and vendors it audits, and takes no money from payers. The pipeline is open source and every published number is reproducible from public data.

For journalists and researchers

Scores publish October 26, 2026. Every number will be reproducible from public data with the open-source pipeline, and every claim will trace back to an archived source file. Data will update monthly, aligned to the federal registry's release. For advance access or interviews before launch, email contact@ghostnetworkwatch.org.

Corrections

Before anything is published, each issuer's technical contact on file with CMS receives a machine-readable export of its flags. Disputes sent to contact@ghostnetworkwatch.org or filed on the public correction tracker will be published verbatim alongside the flags they dispute, except for personal or health information, which we redact and label as redacted. When a later monthly crawl no longer reproduces a flag, it will be marked resolved with the date. History is retained, not deleted.

What this is not

This site doesn't recommend plans or measure care quality, and it makes no claim about any individual clinician. The phrase "ghost networks" names a documented research topic. This site asserts what dated files show, and nothing beyond that.