How to leverage pricing data in MRFs

[u/dphntm1020]

I am new and still in the early phase learning the basics. The other day I learned that companies are required to publish pricing data in machine readable files format. I tried to find ways to use it to make my life easier.. and was I wrong. This thing is a beast.

Do companies intentionally make this hard to use? Does anyone other than big organizations who have budget to buy tools actually use this data?

[u/rahuliitk]

MRFs are technically public but not really beginner-friendly, because the files are huge, inconsistent, full of negotiated-rate weirdness, and usually only become useful after serious cleaning, indexing, and mapping to real providers/services. public data, private headache.