To check on a claim, you first have to know who is actually answering for it. The card says one name, the remittance says another, the clearinghouse wants a payer ID, and the portal belongs to a parent company. Until you resolve that, every other step is a guess.
Today we're opening the Substrate Payer Explorer at substrateai.com/payers: a free search tool for US payers that shows the endpoint that really adjudicates the claim, with its IDs, aliases, available routes and coarse reliability signals.
What you can do with it
Resolve a name to the right payer. Search a name, alias or EDI ID and land on one canonical profile instead of five lookalikes.
Compare routes before you try them. See which of EDI, browser (portal) and API routes exist for a payer, and how recently each has worked. Pick the route that answers before you spend a day on one that doesn't.
Find the details billing teams hunt for. Live programs and lines of business, provider portals, payer IDs, and phone and fax numbers with guidance on when to use them.
Set expectations. Each profile shows typical time to adjudicate, with 10th and 90th percentile ranges, so you know whether a claim that is eight days old is late or normal.
Go beyond the lookup. The same page links to a Prior Authorization Lookup and a BCBS Prefix Lookup, for the other two questions that eat the most time: does this need auth, and which Blue plan is this?
The problems it solves
- Wrong-payer rejections. Sending a status check or eligibility request to the wrong entity produces a rejection, not an answer.
- Stale spreadsheets. Most teams keep a private payer list that is out of date the week it is written. This one is built from live activity.
- Unknown turnaround. Without a baseline, you can't tell a slow payer from a lost claim.
- Portal-only payers. The Substrate Claim Status agent can log into portals for you and check claim status, even when invoked from the Claude Connector
Anyone can use it, and it comes from real work
The explorer is free and needs no account. The information comes from what our agents see across millions of claims, eligibility checks and EOBs for enterprise customers, so the routes and timings reflect what actually happened, not what a payer's website claims.
Prefer to ask in plain English? The same directory is available to your AI assistant through the free Payer MCP. Once you've found the payer, our Claim Status Agent can check the claim itself.
What to keep in mind
This is public reference data only, with no PHI. Payer information changes, so treat it as a guide and verify specifics with the payer. If there's a detail you'd like to see, tell us. More to come.
