For years, the healthcare industry has been fixated on achieving a single “golden record”,  one authoritative, unified source of truth for provider data. It sounds logical. In practice, it’s unachievable.

Provider data is not static. Licenses expire. Providers move. Affiliations change. Exclusions get added. As Megan explains, treating this as a “one-and-done” cleanse, or assuming any single snapshot can stay current, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the data itself.

“This is an always living, breathing type of ecosystem of data. The industry goes round and round on single source of truth, golden record — and it’s really about keeping the data dynamic.”

— Megan Schmidt, President & CEO, Madaket Health

The result? The average provider directory that reaches end consumers is still only around 50% accurate, a figure that cascades into claim denials, member abrasion, and barriers to value-based care.

The instinct when facing a data problem is to buy a better platform. But as both Megan and Nicole argue, deploying more sophisticated technology on top of broken data doesn’t fix the underlying issue; it amplifies it.

A data-first approach flips the script. It means asking: Is our data clean, validated, and actively monitored?,  before selecting or configuring any technology layer. When that foundation is solid, technology can do what it does best: automate, scale, and accelerate.

Nicole points to how this plays out at Verisys today. Clean, continuously monitored provider data is now being used not just in credentialing and enrollment, but in real-time use cases like prior authorization, claims editing, payment integrity, and prescription validation,  proactive applications that prevent problems rather than react to them

The Madaket Health and Verisys partnership was built precisely to address this end-to-end data gap. Verisys brings rigorous credentialing and continuous monitoring capabilities, ensuring that from the moment a provider enters a health system, their data is validated and tracked for changes. Madaket picks up from there, managing that living data through the full payer enrollment process, keeping rosters accurate, payments clean, and the entire ecosystem in sync.

The episode closes with a practical challenge to health systems, payers, and technology leaders: stop waiting for a regulatory mandate to take data quality seriously. The pain is already showing up, in denials, in wasted implementation cycles, in providers and members experiencing friction at the point of care.

Rethinking your data strategy doesn’t have to be painful. It starts with an honest assessment of where your provider data actually stands,  and a willingness to treat data management as a continuous, strategic function rather than a one-time project.

“Technology is the enablement, but data-first is really the strategy.”

— Megan Schmidt, President & CEO, Madaket Health

What if the biggest problem in healthcare tech isn’t the tech at all, but the data behind it?

That’s the question Megan Schmidt, President & CEO of Madaket Health, and Nicole Berryman, SVP of Growth & Partnerships at Verisys, tackled head-on in a recent episode of the Outcomes Rocket Podcast, recorded live on the floor of ViVE in Los Angeles.

Their answer is clear: the industry has been chasing the wrong goal. And the consequences,  in claims denials, inaccurate provider directories, and broken enrollment workflows, are playing out every day.

Connect with Megan Schmidt on LinkedIn | Learn more about Madaket Health

Connect with Nicole Berryman on LinkedIn | Learn more about Verisys

Megan Schmidt and Nicole Berryamn join Outcomes Rocket to expose the real root of healthcare’s provider data crisis, and how a data-first strategy changes everything.