Herewith advice via a Janet Kidd Stewart article in Medical Economics on how physicians and other providers can negotiate the increasing number of narrow networks.

In the piece, Jonathan Gruber, Ph.D., an economics professor at MIT, asserts that early evidence shows that narrow networks cut patient costs without lowering quality.

“Payers already are building algorithms to better answer the outcomes issue, and providers must decide if they will sit back and wait for the results or build their own data sets,” he told Ms. Stewart. “There will definitely be winners and losers.”

She says that Donald Fisher, Ph.D. president and chief executive of the American Medical Group Association, says that providers need to continue to fight  plans that  cherry-pick certain providers for narrow networks and and to  question  insurers’ quality and cost data.