By now, we’ve grown accustomed to the California Division of Workers’ Compensation utterly failing to manage the state’s medical provider network system.

Catherine Montgomery

However, even we were surprised to learn that the DWC can’t manage its MPN webpage. All MPN information has disappeared from the page twice and remains missing as of this writing.

Insurers and employers establish MPNs to restrict employees seeking care for their injuries to a chosen group of doctors. The DWC’s online MPN list is supposed to be where providers and other stakeholders can determine which MPNs apply to a given insurer or employer.

The list has always been an abysmal failure, featuring thousands of (mostly terminated or otherwise inactive) MPNs with no discernible connection to any particular employer or insurer. The list offers no reliable mechanism for a provider to determine which MPN applies to an injured worker or for an injured worker to identify providers from whom they can seek care.

California’s MPN system has never worked, thanks to the singular ineptitude of the DWC. Now, the vanishing MPN list simply reflects that reality. The page’s abject dysfunction may explain how its disappearance attracted little notice, but it was the only MPN resource the DWC offered.

It’s the latest symptom of a workers’ comp system in collapse — a system that is increasingly forcing providers to say no to further participation in this chaos. 

Typically, the DWC updates its MPN web page on the first day of a fiscal quarter. On July 3, 2024, we attempted to download the updated MPN information. However, something important was missing: all of the MPNs.

The searchable MPN list that normally populates the page was gone, with nothing but white space where MPN details normally reside. Further, the downloadable MPN files in CSV, XML and other formats were empty.

We contacted the DWC to inform it of the missing MPN information. The DWC representative thanked daisyBill for the information and “escalated” the problem.

In mid-July, the MPN list returned, but not for long.

At the beginning of Q4 2024, we returned to the MPN webpage to download the latest (so-called) information. Once again, the MPN details were nowhere to be found. The downloadable files were empty, and the searchable list was gone.

As of Oct. 11, all the MPN information remained missing.

From unhelpful to nonexistent

With the passage of Senate Bill 863, the DWC became responsible for maintaining a public online list of MPNs so that injured workers and providers could determine:

• Whether an MPN applies to an injured worker.
• If so, which MPN applies to the injured worker.
• Which providers are members of the applicable MPN.

In other words, when an employer or its insurer restricts workers to an MPN, the law demands that the affected doctors and workers have access to this critical information. However, the DWC chose (again) to ignore the directive of the state lawmakers.

Even when the online MPN list is functioning, it fails to provide the essential information.

The list contains more than 2,500 MPNs, only about 300 of which are active. Of those, many have names that are impossible to associate with any particular employer. This is mostly because the DWC allows mysterious “entities providing physician network services” to maintain MPNs.

With missing employer listings, it is impossible to determine which MPN applies to any given injured worker. Without this employer MPN information, providers cannot verify whether they are part of the applicable MPN.

All of this ambiguity has serious consequences, including delays in treatment and payment, payment denials citing lack of MPN membership, and administrative chaos.

We have repeatedly stressed that the failure to list employers on the MPN website undermines the entire purpose of MPNs: to facilitate injured workers’ care. By providing only the MPN names without any information linking them to the employers that utilize them, the DWC leaves providers, injured workers and even the employers themselves guessing which providers are eligible to treat which employees.

The vanishing MPN list is the latest evidence of the DWC’s apparent indifference to providers’ needs (and rights) and injured workers’ care. By consistently failing to provide critical information and protections, the DWC has forced providers to bow out of this broken system.

Catherine Montgomery is the co-founder and CEO of daisyBill, a provider of workers' comp end-to-end revenue cycle management software. This post appears with permission.