Alma Trotter
April 20, 2021
CareSet Journal is releasing data that links NPI records to the contact domains submitted by providers in their NPI applications. For example, when Jane Smith applied for an NPI, she provided a contact email of "jane.smith@examplehospital.com".
In this data, her NPI will be listed alongside the domain of "examplehospital.com".If you want to dive straight in, you can download the NPI to Contact Domain data here. Here is the GitHub repo for the data release, which includes a README for the data.FOIA backgroundIn 2014 CareSet requested that full contact email addresses, linked to NPIs, be released. The CMS FOIA office did not release those records due to privacy concerns. In response, we requested the domain portion be released.
Years later, CMS informed us that even the domain name alone had privacy concerns. We litigated with CMS and the judge found that at least some NPIs did not have privacy concerns associated with their domain names.Now we are sharing the 203,939 rows of NPI to contact domain data to enable research on the healthcare system.Upcoming analysisStay tuned for our initial analysis of this data where we will examine patterns of interoperability.
The US healthcare system has been reluctantly transferring to digital communications and away from fax. It is fairly well understood that this migration has been going poorly, taking at least a decade longer than it should have. However, with this new dataset, it might be possible to understand more about why this process has gone so poorly and what options might exist to fix these problems.
