Independent physicians make up 42% of the U.S. physician workforce today — a substantial, resilient share of American medicine operating outside the large hospital-owned systems most payer technology was built around. These are often the practices treating a health plan's most complex, highest-cost, and hardest-to-reach members, frequently in communities with the fewest alternatives. That makes independent practice as much a payer-side opportunity as it is a provider-side story, even though the conversation about it has stayed mostly on the provider side.
Affordability pressure is reshaping healthcare from both directions at once. Payers are under pressure to manage cost trend without compromising member outcomes. Independent and community-based providers are stretched thin trying to deliver preventive care with shrinking administrative bandwidth of their own. For years, the industry has built technology to solve each side of that problem separately, treating the independent market as a footnote rather than the center of the story. That approach has run its course.
Two problems, one root cause
A payer's ability to manage cost trend depends on catching a care gap early, understanding a member's real risk profile, and getting that information into a provider's hands before a routine issue becomes an expensive one. A provider's ability to deliver that care depends on having accurate, timely information available at the point of care, without adding another system to log into or another workflow to learn.
These are not two problems. They are the same problem, viewed from opposite ends of the same data pipeline. When payer analytics, clinical data exchange, and provider workflows are built as separate investments, the industry ends up paying twice for infrastructure that was always meant to be one connected system.
Veradigm's position in the independent market
Veradigm's position here is a genuine advantage, built from the provider side up. Long before payer analytics existed as a category, Veradigm was building the EHR relationships that connect independent, community-based providers to the rest of the healthcare system. That heritage means Veradigm already sits on both sides of the value-based care equation: an EHR vendor with deep, established reach into the independent market, and a payer technology provider building the infrastructure that reaches that same market. That combination is rare, and it's exactly what the next chapter of value-based care requires.
Built on infrastructure that already spans both sides
This is not a hypothetical. In May 2026, Veradigm launched its Health Network Architecture, connecting the clinical, financial, and operational systems independent practices already use, from EHR and practice management to clearinghouse and patient portal, into one real-time view. As Tehsin Syed, Veradigm's Chief Product and Technology Officer, put it at launch: “For years, healthcare technology added a new tool for every new requirement, but never a way to make them work together. Veradigm Health Network Architecture changes that.”
The payer impact of that shift is direct. Care gaps that close during the visit lower outreach costs and improve risk adjustment coding accuracy, and chart retrieval that once took weeks now takes minutes, connected through standards-based FHIR APIs rather than months-long custom integrations. Veradigm's Payer Platform, spanning analytics, clinical data exchange, and comprehensive submissions, runs on that same connected infrastructure, which today helps more than 20,000 provider practices connect with health plans and biopharma, supports more than 80 health plan clients and over 20 million patients, and is recognized as the number one Black Book Payer Analytics provider and number two in KLAS Risk Analytics.
Where this goes next
The plans and providers who benefit most from where value-based care is headed will be the ones who stop treating the independent market as a footnote. Whether the conversation is about payer technology, provider connectivity, or which market segment matters most going forward, the answer increasingly comes back to the same 42%.
Learn more about Veradigm's Payer Platform at Veradigm.com
By Don Trigg, CEO, Veradigm
