The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services plans to begin dissemination of national provider identifier numbers today on its Web site.
The August 1 release, delayed one month by CMS from the original date, will enable anyone to access NPIs and related information from the NPI Registry, a query-only database. By August 7, CMS plans to make available a downloadable file containing all provider information that the agency believes it can legally release.
The public release of NPIs and related information initially was opposed by several organizations, most notably the American Medical Association, which sent an extensive letter detailing its opposition to the form of the public release of information.
CMS said the information it will release can be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act. It asked providers to review the information in the weeks before the August 1 release to ensure that none of the information that was disclosed was personal in nature.
CMS did take steps to ramp up review of 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. Additionally, CMS said it will temporarily suppress the employer identification numbers of organization providers, after discovering that some providers reported Social Security numbers in the EIN field.
Also, CMS said it is suppressing from 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 used to make payments in the past.
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 releasing the NPIs while its still in the contingency phase for implementing the identification numbers. Soon before a May 23, 2007 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.