Medicare launched a chronic-care pilot in July. A month in, the doctor list it promised still isn't public.

Medicare started enrolling patients in a new chronic-care pilot called ACCESS on July 5. A month later, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is asking beneficiaries to opt in, but the list of providers who joined the program has not been published.

The gap sounds bureaucratic until you try to act on it. ACCESS (formally, the Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions model) is a 10-year Innovation Center experiment that pays participating organizations a fixed, predictable amount for managing common chronic conditions. Providers get the full payment only when patients hit measurable goals, like lower blood pressure or reduced pain. The theory is that paying for outcomes, not visits, gives doctors and digital-health vendors room to spend more time on the patients who need it.

CMS has framed the model as a patient-friendly alternative to fee-for-service medicine. The agency has published a 150-plus-name accepted-applicants list and a program blog explaining how the four clinical tracks (early cardio-kidney-metabolic, cardio-kidney-metabolic, musculoskeletal, and behavioral health) will work. The four tracks together cover conditions that affect more than two-thirds of people on Medicare, including diabetes, chronic kidney disease, hypertension, depression, and chronic pain.

What CMS has not published is the directory it said it would maintain so beneficiaries could find and compare participating organizations by their risk-adjusted outcomes. In its launch post, the agency described that directory as a tool for patients to "find and compare options," a public-facing complement to the practitioners-only applicant list. A month into the performance period, it has not appeared.

That matters because ACCESS is voluntary and Original Medicare, not Medicare Advantage, was designed to be the test bed. Beneficiaries who want to enroll typically need a referral or to find an ACCESS organization on their own. Without a directory, the only practical path is to call a provider's office and ask whether they are in ACCESS, then wait for an answer that may or may not be correct. The agency has not framed the gap as intentional; in CMS language, the directory is in development, not abandoned.

A STAT+ newsletter flagged the same asymmetry this week. The premise: regulators have a list of participating providers; patients do not. The patient-discoverability framing is a policy and operations observation grounded in CMS documentation, not an attribution of intent.

The other piece worth watching is timing. The CMS blog announced a "Health Tech Ecosystem" of more than 450 organizations preparing for "initial ecosystem releases planned for March 2026." August has arrived; the March releases are not on the public CMS site in a form a beneficiary can browse. CMS has not said why the slip happened or when the directory and the ecosystem portal will appear.

Two practical things a reader can do this week: ask your primary-care office whether they are a participating ACCESS organization, and if they are not, whether they can refer you to one. CMS has said primary-care clinicians can bill a co-management payment for reviewing ACCESS updates and coordinating care, so the office has a financial reason to know the answer. Second, check the accepted-applicants page for organizations in your state. The list was last updated Aug. 3 and includes familiar names like Devoted Medical, Headspace, Noom, and Curai Health, many of which have not historically served Original Medicare.

The directory CMS promised is the load-bearing piece. If it shows up before the end of the first performance year, the gap closes and ACCESS looks like a normal program rollout. If it does not, the asymmetry between a patient-facing recruitment push and a clinician-only transparency list becomes the story.