Independent research on physician group economics

What your commercial rates say about your negotiating position — and what your payers may still owe you.

The Physician Economics Institute tracks commercial reimbursement, payer rate variance, and revenue cycle performance for physician groups nationwide — and audits actual remittance against payer transparency files to surface underpayments.

Commercial rate benchmarking CBSA 19100 — DALLAS–FORT WORTH, TX
Office/outpatient visit, est. pt99214 $118 −9% vs market
Knee arthroplasty27447 $1,842 +4% vs market
MRI, lower extremity73721 $412 −14% vs market
Rotator cuff repair, arthroscopic29827 $1,486 +2% vs market
Lakeshore Orthopedic Group, LLC vs. median commercial rate paid by Meridian Health Plan to groups within the same CBSA. Illustrative example only.
Research areas

Three areas of focus for physician group leadership

Commercial rate benchmarking

Rates are compared within your CBSA, so your group is only benchmarked against payers and peers competing in the same market — never a national blend.

Payment accuracy audits

We compare what payers actually remitted against their own published machine-readable rates to surface systematic underpayments — often mischaracterized as provider billing errors.

Claims adjudication accuracy

Where routing and adjudication logic silently cost margin — separate from your contracted rates entirely, and easy to miss without transaction-level review.

Latest research

Recent bulletins

Q3 2026 commercial rate index for physician groups, by CBSA

A quarterly read on where groups sit against peer and payer rates within their own market — covering every billed CPT, not a sample set.

Rate index

The underpayment gap: what our audits are finding in payer remittance

Across early audits, a recurring pattern of remittance falling short of payers' own published machine-readable rates — and how to document it for recovery.

Payment audit

Ghost rates: why your fee schedule benchmark may be wrong

How unadjudicated and placeholder rates distort machine-readable-file benchmarks, and how to filter for the rates payers actually pay.

Methodology
About the institute

Built on the same data infrastructure that powers payer analytics — pointed the other direction.

The Physician Economics Institute is the research arm of Curalogix, built to give physician group leadership the same rate transparency that payers and health systems already have.

Every figure traces back to source: payer machine-readable files and remittance data — not self-reported benchmarks or payer-supplied summaries.

100% sourced from MRFs
Since 2022, health plans have been required to publish their negotiated rates in machine-readable files, or MRFs. Our analysis is built entirely on this payer-published data — not estimates, and not self-reported.
Nationwide
Coverage across payers and markets, with rates always compared within the same CBSA
All CPTs
Every billed procedure code analyzed, not a sample or top-volume subset
Network specific
Rates are compared not just by payer, but by network within that payer, since the same payer can pay very different rates across its own networks

Get your group's rate position, before your next negotiation.

A 20-minute briefing on where your commercial rates stand against national peers, and whether your payers are paying you accurately.

Request a briefing