Your top payer just published something you've probably never looked at.

Under CMS's Interoperability and Prior Authorization Final Rule — CMS-0057-F, the same rule that shortened standard prior auth decisions to 7 calendar days — payers were required to begin publicly reporting specific prior authorization metrics on their own websites by March 31, 2026. Approval rates. Denial rates. Average and median turnaround times.

It's sitting on their site right now.

What changed, exactly

Before this requirement, a practice's read on a specific payer was anecdotal. "This payer is slow." "This payer denies more than the others." True, probably — but nothing you could point to in writing, nothing you could hold them to, nothing that survived a payer rep saying "that hasn't been our experience."

That changes now. If a payer's own publicly reported denial rate or turnaround time doesn't match what your practice is actually experiencing, that's no longer a complaint. It's a documented discrepancy — between what they're required to report and what they're actually doing.

That's a completely different conversation to have with a payer rep, with a state insurance commissioner, or in an appeal letter citing the gap.

What to look for when you find it

Payers have posted this under compliance or transparency sections, not somewhere obvious like a provider portal homepage. Search "[payer name] prior authorization metrics 2026" or "[payer name] interoperability reporting" — that usually gets there faster than navigating their site structure directly.

Once you find it, three things are worth checking:

Turnaround times against the CMS deadlines. Standard decisions: 7 calendar days. Expedited: 72 hours. If a payer's own published average is approaching or exceeding those numbers, that's a compliance gap on their part — worth flagging, not absorbing.

Denial rates by specialty or procedure category, if they're broken out that way. A payer with a notably high denial rate for imaging or a specific procedure type is useful to know about before the next submission, not after the next denial.

Trends over time, if prior-period data is included. A payer trending toward higher denial rates over quarters is a different operational risk than one that's stayed flat.

How to actually use this

The most direct use is in an appeal. If a payer's published turnaround time consistently misses the 7-day standard and your appeal was delayed, citing the specific published metric and the specific CMS deadline in writing is more powerful than a general complaint that they're slow.

The second use is in payer-relations conversations. A documented discrepancy between published numbers and lived experience is a concrete thing to bring to a payer rep — not "we've been having problems" but "your published average is X and our last 30 cases averaged Y — what's the explanation for that gap?"

The third use is internal. Knowing which of your top payers has the worst published denial rate for your specialty changes how you prioritize documentation and appeals resources before a submission, not after.

A short checklist to run right now

1. Pull your top 3–5 payers by submission volume.
2. Search "[payer name] prior authorization metrics 2026" for each.
3. Note their published average turnaround time vs. the 7-day/72-hour CMS standard.
4. Note their overall denial rate and, if available, denial rate by specialty or procedure.
5. Compare against your own team's experience over the last 90 days.
6. Flag any gap worth raising — in your next appeal letter or your next payer-relations touchpoint.

The honest bottom line

This data existing doesn't fix a single denial on its own. What it does is give independent practices a public, payer-published number to hold a payer to — instead of relying purely on anecdote and frustration. Most practices haven't done this check yet, because most don't know the requirement exists.

That gap is worth closing before the data gets stale and before the payer reps realize most practices still haven't looked.

If tracking payer patterns, building the case in appeals, and managing the documentation across your top payers is the part eating your team's time, asaanbil.com handles the prior auth and appeals side of that stack — free pilot, no card required. asaanbil.com (https://asaanbil.com)