Create, use provider groups

In concert with our new peer benchmarks report, we are excited to announce our new provider group user experience. This article will cover what provider groups are useful for along with how to create and edit them.

Why create provider groups?

Provider groups are useful concepts to name a collection of NPIs, EINs you spent time researching. We cover the ins-and-outs of why a provider group may have multiple NPIs, EINs you need to grab to generate results in our provider search guide here but groups is a useful way to save that work and apply it inside Signal.

For example, if you wanted to research a nationwide group, you could see multiple NPIs by region:

In addition, each of these NPIs may cross-walk to a unique EIN. Once you have done all the work to figure out the right EINs, NPIs, provider groups is the mechanism to keep those EINs, NPIs together and apply them to future searches + reports.

Creating and editing provider groups

Let's say you want to research oncology groups in Texas.

First, use our provider search guide to find the right EINs, NPIs to grab for your oncology groups of interest:

Then, for the EINs, NPIs you have interest in — click the green 'add to group' button to pull up a menu of existing groups as well as an option to create a new group:

• Adding to an existing group auto-adds the EIN or NPI you have selected to the named group of choice
• Creating a new group requires you specify a name for the group and then auto-adds the EIN or NPI you have selected to the named group of choice

If you want to see which groups you have, either click the 'Groups' button or open the providers panel:

Each group will have an ellipsis button on the right hand side of 'Select Group'

If clicked, you have a menu of ways to edit the group, including options to:

1. Delete the group (bottom right hand side corner)
2. Remove EINs, NPIs inside the group
3. Re-name the group

Using provider groups

With your groups created and refined, you can leverage them in several modes in Signal:

Peer Benchmarks

Want to know what Oncology Group A's rates are everywhere they are in-network? Click 'select group' on the providers panel (plus the others you want to compare to and the codes you want to compare against) and hit 'generate report':

Oncology group A shows up as the first column in the report:

Please note the following for groups containing multiple EINs and NPIs:

• Peer Benchmarks only performs searches on entries in the 'EIN' field. This means we do not search Type-1 NPIs (e.g., individual professionals) in provider groups.
• For each payer and code, Peer Benchmarks will aggregate across all the relevant 'EIN' entries in the provider group. For example, let's say your provider group has 2 EINs: '871927518', '841856765' and you search 90837 in Cigna:
  • The raw data has 3 entries: 1 for EIN 871927518 (top row) and 2 for EIN 841856765 (bottom two rows).

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  • In Peer Benchmarks, you will see the following result depending on which aggregation method you choose:
    • Most NPIs: This will grab the last row with 6745 npi's and return the rate as $109
    • Min: This will grab the second row with 1 npi in Colorado and return the rate as $74
    • Max: This will grab the first row with 1419 npis and return the rate as $109

Lastly, you can still generate peer benchmarks reports without adding a group but then the EIN will appear in the column header instead of the group name:

For this reason, we recommend you add the EIN to a group and name it for ease of comparison.

Search

Unlike Peer Benchmarks, using provider groups in Search mode will not aggregate the data in any way across the EINs, NPIs you select or re-name a provider group for you.

Instead, a provider group in search mode only passes the NPIs, EINs you specified as filters in the providers panel to retrieve the correct raw data.

Given you are in search mode, you must also specify which payers you want to select — which is not a requirement in Peer Benchmarks.