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 have repeatedly found that most listed mental-health providers in insurance directories cannot actually be seen: numbers do not answer, clinicians left the network years ago, panels are closed. Federal law already requires every marketplace insurer to publish its full directory as machine-readable data and update it monthly, and CMS's own file reviews from 2017 to 2021 found 29 to 47 percent of files fully accurate. Those reviews named no issuers, imposed no penalties, and were not continued.

Beginning in plan year 2029, CMS will publish directory accuracy scores for Medicare Advantage plans under the REAL Health Providers Act. Marketplace enrollees get nothing equivalent. This project fills that gap now: a continuous, public, evidence-backed audit of every federal marketplace issuer's mandated directory file, with mental health first.

Who

Ghost Network Watch is built and operated by Soorena Sasani, a cloud solutions architect, as an independent public-interest project. It is not affiliated with CMS, any insurer, or any vendor, 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 decompose to archived evidence. Data will update monthly, aligned to the federal registry's release. To arrange advance access, interviews, or custom data cuts before launch: contact@ghostnetworkwatch.org.

Corrections

Before anything is published, each issuer's technical contact on file with CMS receives the complete 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. 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 does not recommend plans. It does not measure care quality. 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.