Method and sources

What we collect

Only published policy documents: national and local coverage determinations, Medicare Administrative Contractor policy articles and revision logs, commercial payer clinical policy bulletins and provider newsrooms, published fee schedules and prior-authorisation lists, the Federal Register, and state Medicaid provider bulletins.

Nothing behind a login. No paywall circumvention, no bot-wall evasion, no patient data, no claims data, no protected health information. Where a source publishes a bulk file or an API, that is used in preference to scraping a page.

How a change is detected

1. Identify by document, not by URL. Each document is keyed by its own identifier — LCD number, policy article number, bulletin number. A URL that moves does not create a change.
2. Normalise before comparing. Navigation, footers, cookie notices and "last updated" furniture are stripped first. A whitespace or layout edit is not a change and is not reported.
3. Compare fields, not lines. Effective date, status, criteria text, code lists and rates are compared individually, because a field-level difference produces a sentence a person can act on and a line-level difference does not.
4. Classify. New, revised, retired, effective-date change, rate change, code list change.
5. Quote the source. Summaries are extractive. Each statement carries the span of source text it came from. If there is no quotable span, the item is queued for review rather than published.
6. Match to your scope. Only changes matching your codes, payers and states are rendered into your issue.

Canaries

Every source carries an expected shape: a minimum number of items, strings that must be present, and a maximum age. If a source returns an empty list, a changed layout or a document set older than expected, that is treated as a source failure. The issue then names the source at the top and states what was not checked. A failed source never produces an issue that reads "no changes this week".

What we do not do

• We do not determine whether a device or service is covered for a patient.
• We do not provide billing, coding, clinical or legal advice.
• We do not estimate reimbursement or predict payer behaviour.
• We do not ingest customer claims, and we do not hold patient information.
• We do not publish a summary that cannot be traced to a quoted span of the source.

Why the limits are the product

A monitoring service that starts answering "does this apply to me" has started giving advice, and advice is a different business with a different liability. The value here is narrower and more useful: you are told what changed, when it takes effect, who it binds, and where the document is. The judgement about your product stays with you.