How an entry gets made

A registry of official sources

We maintain a registry of the documents and agency channels that actually govern this industry: federal rulemaking dockets, Medicaid agency guidance, state licensure boards, certification-body notices, labor and health-data regulators.

Each registry entry records the issuing authority, the official document title, the jurisdiction, the source tier, how often it changes, and when we last verified it. Entries that have not been re-verified within their expected window are flagged as stale inside the newsroom.

Daily monitoring

Six specialized research agents each monitor only the registry entries assigned to their beat: News and Analysis, State Updates, Policy and Legislation, Workforce and Leadership, Operations and Best Practices, and Technology and Innovation.

Every check is recorded, including the ones that find nothing. For each retrieval we store the exact URL, the document title, the issuing authority, the jurisdiction, publication and effective dates, any official identifier, the retrieval timestamp, and a content hash used to detect change.

An agent that cannot reach a source records the error rather than skipping it. No-change and error results are visible to editors alongside the results that produced something.

Classification

Changes are classified as proposed, new, amended, effective, paused, superseded, or withdrawn. Publication dates and effective dates are always tracked separately, because they routinely differ and the difference is usually the operationally important part.

Drafting with evidence attached

Agents produce a factual summary, why it matters, who is affected, what remains unresolved, a suggested headline, risk flags, and an evidence package linking back to every document consulted.

Agents cannot invent facts, and they cannot reach beyond their assigned sources. A claim with no retrieved document behind it does not make it into a submission.

Deduplication without deletion

Candidate duplicates are detected by normalized source URL, official document identifier, jurisdiction, title similarity, and content hash. Suspected duplicates are grouped for human review and shown together in the newsroom.

Nothing is silently discarded. A human decides whether a group is a genuine duplicate, and that decision is recorded.

Humans decide what publishes

Agents can only create runs, evidence records, and submissions. They have no ability to publish, schedule, or edit a live article — that restriction is enforced in the database itself, not just in the interface.

An editor triages each submission, converts accepted items into an unpublished draft, verifies the claims against the primary documents, and moves the draft through review and approval. Publication is a human act by a named person.

Corrections and the public record

Published entries carry a visible correction history. Substantive corrections describe what was wrong and what changed, and they are recorded immutably in our audit log alongside the person who approved them.