Why A Fraction of a Percent Actually Matters

The pooled exclusion rate across all networks is 0.043% — roughly 1 in every 2,340 providers. On its own, that looks small, but scaled to a real network, its impact is significant. It means that a payer with 500,000 providers in its directory would carry roughly 215 excluded providers that members could still schedule appointments with.

The distribution is also uneven. The median exclusion rate across the 144 networks is 0.030%, but the average is pulled higher by a long tail of worse performers. The single worst network in this dataset had an exclusion rate roughly 18 times the median. A raw percentage flattens that variation and hides both the scale of the problem and how much worse it can get at the tail.