WASHINGTON – After a couple of false starts, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services was expected to begin disseminating national provider identifier numbers this month on its Web site.
Last month, CMS announced that it expected to begin making the numbers available on September 4 from the NPI Registry, a query-only database. A week after that date, CMS expects to make available a downloadable version of the database, which will contain all provider information that the agency believes it can legally release.
This is the second delay in release of NPI numbers and related data.
CMS had originally hoped to release the NPI information by June 30, but pushed that back to August 1 to give providers time to review data associated with their NPIs. With the second delay, CMS said more time was needed to fix mistakes.
“We must build in time to resolve any errors or problems that may be encountered with edits that healthcare providers submit,” a CMS spokesman said. The agency set August 20 as a deadline for submitting corrections to NPI data.
CMS also reaffirmed that the delays won’t change the requirement that HIPAA-covered entities must comply with the requirements of the NPI final rule no later than May 23, 2008. CMS already has delayed NPI implementation by issuing a contingency plan this past spring.
The public release of NPIs and related information has been opposed by several organizations – most notably the American Medical Association, which sent an extensive letter detailing its opposition. CMS said the information it will release can be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act.
CMS took steps to review the numbers and any information that could jeopardize providers’ privacy. For example, CMS said it won’t disclose FOIA-disclosable data for any health providers that have deactivated their NPI, and it will temporarily suspress the employer identification numbers of organization providers because it discovered that some providers reported Social Security numbers in the EIN field.
Also, CMS said it won’t display SSNs and IRS taxpayer identification numbers that providers may have initially provided as optional information as part of the NPI application process. A field containing optional information is considered crucial for the industry as it attempts to match NPIs with legacy identification numbers that payers and other payment service providers had used in the past to make payments.
The data dissemination file will be downloadable as a compressed ZIP file that will contain a code value document, a header file document and the FOIA-disclosable provider data that is a comma-separated value file expected to be about 340 megabytes in size as a compressed file and nearly 800 megabytes when uncompressed.
CMS is still in the contingency phase for implementing the identification numbers. Shortly before a May 23 deadline to fully implement NPIs on all claims, CMS put a contingency plan in place to give the industry another year to adopt NPIs and fully test their use to make sure legacy provider numbers are mapped to the new numbers. Without such testing, many groups were concerned that payments for claims would be unnecessarily delayed.