Payerset, a company that cleans up and sells healthcare price data, announced on September 24, 2026 a tool called Research Assistant. In plain terms, it lets a hospital type a question about what insurers pay and get a straight answer back, with no analyst or data team in the middle.
The problem with the data
In 2022 the Transparency in Coverage rule took effect, and health plans had to publish the rates they negotiate with providers. The idea was to show hospitals, employers and patients what care really costs. What came out was a pile of machine-readable files that almost nobody could use. One insurer’s file can run to billions of rows, published in inconsistent formats and full of errors. Think of it like being handed every receipt a store ever printed and being asked which aisle makes the most money.
Payerset was founded that same year by Jerry DiMaso and Jacob Little to fix exactly this, by building the plumbing that normalizes the files. The company says it now processes more than 20 trillion records of contracted rates every quarter.
What the new tool does
Research Assistant pulls negotiated rates, claims, policy and market benchmarks into one place. Users see the current market and also how rates have moved over time. The practical upshot is that questions a contracting team would once have sent to analysts can be asked directly: how do our rates compare with peer health systems, which states reimburse a service line best, and where is a fee schedule gap costing revenue before negotiations even begin.
“Instead of handing someone a spreadsheet with more data, we’re fixing healthcare pricing by delivering the right answer, instantly,” DiMaso, the company’s CEO, said.
It comes in two forms. One is a Model Context Protocol server that connects Payerset’s pricing, claims and policy data to AI tools a health system already uses, including Claude and ChatGPT. The other is a companion portal with a chat-style interface inside Payerset’s own platform, for teams without their own AI setup. It builds on two earlier products: Rate Explorer, which lets managed care and finance teams compare negotiated rates, and Data Lake, which gives health tech firms and consultants API access to the same data.
Early uptake
Jiro Health, a platform that turns real-world data into financial and clinical insights for clinicians and physician-led practices, is already folding Payerset’s normalized pricing and claims data into its product. Greg Field, Jiro’s founder and CEO, said individual clinicians and small practices have had even less visibility into this kind of data than health systems.
Little, Payerset’s chief commercial officer, said health systems that normally take months to evaluate new products have been telling the company to “just turn it on.” Payerset says it has grown without institutional capital and has stayed profitable since early in its history.
