The NPPES provider registry
The national NPI registry for enumerated Type 1 and Type 2 records, with available submitted taxonomy and address fields and their limitations.
Open →The short answer
What counts as healthcare provider data, and where does it come from?
Healthcare provider data is the public record of who a clinician or facility is: their NPI, specialty taxonomy, practice address, Medicare enrollment, and quality and enforcement history. Almost all of it is published by the federal government — the national NPPES registry, CMS PECOS, Care Compare, Open Payments — and scattered across dozens of files that disagree on the same provider.
Fonteum resolves those files into one entity graph and displays available source metadata alongside supported fields, so a provider record reads as a single answer you can re-derive on demand. Read the source-scoped definitions of NPPES and the Medicare contractor identifier PTAN.
Datasets & sources
The federal source families that make up a provider record. Each page leads with a liftable stat, a visible-HTML table, and a downloadable extract.
CMS PECOS Medicare enrollment
Medicare enrollment and ordering/referring status, keyed to the NPI and dated to its source file.
Open →Browse published federal datasets
Published source pages show available statistics, tables, methods, and limitations.
Open →Source families & cadence
The active-source registry with declared cadence, jurisdiction coverage, and displayability notes.
Open →The provider entity graph
How providers, organizations, and facilities are resolved across NPI, CCN, and PECOS-ID into one entity.
Open →CMS Care Compare facility data
Quality, staffing, and ownership signals for nursing homes, hospices, dialysis, and ASCs — keyed by CCN.
Open →Look one up
Research on the provider record
Original, reproducible studies built on the same provider graph — the donor pages that earn citations.
What's actually inside NPPES
A field-by-field read of the national provider registry and what each column really tells you.
Open →Who can bill Medicare, by specialty
What PECOS enrollment reveals about the active Medicare provider population.
Open →The Medicare deactivation spike
A dated look at NPI deactivations and what drives them.
Open →All original studies
The research bureau — every study with its method, dataset, and CSV/JSON downloads.
Open →Key terms
What is an NPI number?
The 10-digit National Provider Identifier — what it is and how CMS assigns it.
Open →NPPES, defined
The registry CMS runs behind every NPI.
Open →PECOS, defined
Medicare's provider enrollment system.
Open →Provider taxonomy codes
The NUCC code set that classifies a provider's specialty.
Open →CCN — the facility identifier
The CMS Certification Number that keys facility-level data.
Open →Put it to work
Credentialing & provider-data enrichment
Enrich a roster with licensure, enrollment, and taxonomy from one API.
Open →The capability layer
REST, MCP, FHIR R4, bulk export, and point-in-time snapshots over the same graph.
Open →How source metadata is exposed
The nullable provenance schema and methodology used where rendered values carry source metadata.
Open →Common questions
Answers in one line each
- Is healthcare provider data free to use?
- The federal records — NPPES, PECOS, Care Compare, Open Payments — are public works and free to download and cite. Fonteum keeps reads of that public data free so AI engines can cite it; authentication raises rate limits and unlocks bulk export and signed attestation.
- What is the difference between NPPES and PECOS?
- CMS assigns NPIs through NPPES to eligible individuals and organizations; PECOS records Medicare enrollment. An NPI is an administrative identifier, not proof of Medicare participation, licensure, or credentialing. A provider can have an NPI without an active PECOS enrollment, and the two sources join only where PECOS supplies that NPI.
- How does Fonteum keep provider data current?
- Each source family has its own publication and pull cadence. Fonteum records the source release or observation date where available and hashes retained source files when a hash is present. Point-in-time row history currently exists only for named sources such as UK and OFAC sanctions, procurement awards, and a small set of superseded provenance claims; it is not universal replay.
- How do you resolve one provider across many federal files?
- Records are linked deterministically on shared identifiers — NPI, CCN, PECOS-ID, and chain identifiers — into one entity. Linked assertions retain source-row and snapshot metadata when those values are available. The entity graph is how a provider reads as a single answer instead of a dozen conflicting rows.
Go deeper
The other pillar guides
START HERE
Pull an NPPES record with source-supported identifier links.
Look up an NPI free, or request access to call the API and inspect the source metadata available on a provider record.