Less waste in the plan, fewer problems for your people.
Employers do not connect to the network — your plans and TPAs do. But employers fund much of the waste the network removes: premiums and administrative fees carry the cost of the portals, phone calls, and rework, and employees carry the delays. A plan on the shared network means fewer coverage errors and avoidable denials reaching HR, faster authorizations for employees waiting on care, and less administrative cost inside the plan over time. There is nothing for you to buy or build — the value should be measured inside the plan you already fund.
Your role is simple: ask whether your plan and TPA are on the network.
Seven questions to ask your plan or TPA
Self-funded plan sponsors carry fiduciary duties over plan administrative costs.
- Has our plan tested its CMS-0057 APIs on the shared network?
- Will it meet its 2027 CMS-0057 obligations on the shared network path?
- Where optional services such as connection management or analytics would create value for our covered book, is it evaluating them? Optional services are separate purchases; included Open Access exchange carries no SHN fee.
- What is your path and timeline for making prior-authorization status visible to members?
- Will eligibility and coverage-error denials be measured before and after launch?
- How will administrative savings show up in our plan economics?
- Will you support the targeted January 2027 prior-authorization pathways, and evaluate additional use cases as their scope and fee treatment are established?
Employers don’t connect to the network; their questions move the plans that do.
One question to ask your TPA this quarter: will you authorize Smart Health Network to test against your plan’s own CMS-0057 sandbox APIs — the plan’s test surface, distinct from SHN’s Preview test environment — that you’ve already built? Testing against those APIs is how participation starts — on synthetic data, with nothing deployed — and the deeper production path follows through an organization-authorized route on the plan’s timeline.