NPI · shortage areas · FHIR R4
- active providers
CMS NPPES
National NPI + specialty
active providers (~8M total NPI records) keyed by NPI, with NUCC taxonomy code, entity type, and practice address. The single national registry — no state-by-state stitching — which is what a telehealth platform routing across jurisdictions needs to confirm a clinician's identity and specialty.
- HPSA + MUA/MUP designations
HRSA HPSA + shortage areas
Care-gap routing signal
HRSA Health Professional Shortage Area designations — primary care, dental, and mental health — unified with Medically Underserved Area / Population (MUA/MUP) data. The federal map of where provider supply is thin, so a telehealth network can prioritize routing into the geographies that need remote coverage most.
- 5 USCDI v3 resources
FHIR R4 US Core 6.1.0
Cross-jurisdiction API
5 distinct USCDI v3 Provider resources — Practitioner, PractitionerRole, Organization, Location, HealthcareService — over one national surface. SMART Backend Services auth for system-to-system integration. The CapabilityStatement at /api/fhir/metadata is the discovery entry point. One of 44 federal source families behind it.
One national identity layer — auditable to the source
NPI as a national, cross-jurisdiction identifier
The NPI is a single federal identifier that resolves the same provider in every US jurisdiction, which is what a cross-state telehealth encounter requires. Fonteum anchors its graph on the NPI across active providers, joining NPPES taxonomy and practice location to one auditable record per clinician — no state-by-state stitching, each value attributable to a named federal source.
Shortage areas as a routing signal
Telehealth's strongest fit is where provider supply is thinnest. Fonteum publishes HRSA designations for primary care, dental, and mental health alongside MUA/MUP data, so a network can prioritize remote capacity toward the geographies a federal designation marks as underserved. Pairing that map with the NPPES provider graph shows both where the gap is and which clinicians can fill it — joined from federal primary sources, not a commercial coverage estimate.
Integrity screening built into the lookup
Routing a patient to a clinician means the clinician must not be excluded from federal programs. Fonteum's unified exclusion check spans the OIG LEIE, SAM.gov, and state Medicaid lists at /api/v1/exclusions, keyed to the same NPI as the lookup. A telehealth platform can screen as part of the same call that resolves the provider, with every result carrying its source citation and the date the file was checked. State licensure remains out of scope by doctrine; the federal exclusion layer is in.
From federal portal to routed encounter
Ingest
Fonteum pulls directly from the federal portals on each source's native cadence — CMS NPPES as a weekly full-replacement file ( active providers with taxonomy), designations on HRSA's schedule, and the OIG LEIE exclusion list monthly. No intermediary aggregator sits between the routing decision and the government file, so a lookup reflects the current federal source.
Provenance
Every field is written with its source name, last-checked date, and documented limitation through the provider_field_provenance layer. A provider profile a patient sees — specialty, practice location, exclusion status — is traceable to the exact federal file and date it came from. For a telehealth surface routing patients to care, that auditable chain is what backs the data shown rather than asserting accuracy without a source.
Deliver
Provider and shortage-area data is available free as public research at /research, /providers, and the /data shortage-area surfaces, through the FHIR R4 US Core 6.1.0 API with SMART Backend Services auth, via semantic search at /search, and via HL7 bulk $export for loading a large provider set. Scoped pilot exports — NPPES plus HPSA scoped to your specialties and geographies — start at $2,500/mo with the field-level provenance intact.
Common questions
- How does Fonteum support provider lookup for a telehealth platform?
- Fonteum exposes CMS NPPES — the national provider registry of active providers, drawn from roughly 8M total NPI records and refreshed weekly as a full-replacement file — keyed by NPI with NUCC taxonomy code, entity type, and practice address. Because the NPI is a single national identifier rather than a state-issued one, a telehealth platform can look up and confirm a clinician across every US jurisdiction from one source instead of reconciling 50 state files. Lookup is available through the FHIR R4 Practitioner and PractitionerRole resources, the public /providers and /npi surfaces, and semantic search at /search for natural-language queries by specialty or geography. Each value carries its source name and last-checked date through the provider_field_provenance layer, so a profile a patient sees is traceable to the federal record. Fonteum is a source-provenanced data layer over public federal data, not a licensure board or a credentialing decision system — it supplies the auditable inputs those checks rely on.
- How can telehealth platforms use HRSA shortage-area data for routing?
- HRSA designates Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs) for primary care, dental, and mental health, and separately designates Medically Underserved Areas and Populations (MUA/MUP) — the federal geography of where provider supply is too thin to meet need. Telehealth's value proposition is strongest exactly in those areas, so the designations function as a routing and prioritization signal: a network can steer remote capacity toward the counties and populations a federal marks as underserved. Fonteum publishes the unified shortage-area dataset at /data/hrsa-hpsa-shortage-areas and the MUA/MUP surface at /data/hrsa-mua-mup, each with its source citation, designation date, and documented limitations. Pairing HPSA geography with the NPPES provider graph lets a platform see both where the gap is and which clinicians are positioned to fill it — joined from federal primary sources rather than a commercial coverage estimate.
- What does cross-jurisdiction provider validation mean here?
- A telehealth encounter often crosses state lines — the patient in one state, the clinician in another — which makes consistent, national provider identity essential. Fonteum's backbone is the NPI, a single federal identifier that resolves the same provider regardless of which state's system a downstream platform started from. Against that identifier, Fonteum joins the federal signals that matter for routing and integrity: NPPES taxonomy and practice location, CMS PECOS Medicare enrollment, and the unified exclusion check across OIG LEIE, SAM.gov, and state Medicaid lists at /api/v1/exclusions. The result is one auditable record per NPI rather than fragments scattered across jurisdictions. Fonteum does not assert that a provider holds an active license in a given state — state licensure boards are out of scope by doctrine — but it gives a platform the national federal identity layer and the exclusion-screening layer to build cross-jurisdiction workflows on, each field traceable to its source.
- Does Fonteum offer a FHIR R4 API for telehealth integrations?
- Yes. Fonteum implements HL7 FHIR R4 against US Core 6.1.0, exposing 5 distinct USCDI v3 Provider resources: Practitioner, PractitionerRole, Organization, Location, and HealthcareService. SMART Backend Services authorization supports unattended system-to-system integration, so a telehealth platform's scheduling or provider-search service can pull records without an interactive login. The CapabilityStatement enumerating all five resources and their search parameters is served at /api/fhir/metadata — the standard discovery endpoint a technical integration probes first. For loading or refreshing a large provider set, HL7 FHIR Bulk Data Access via the $export operation returns NDJSON. Each FHIR resource carries a 14-tuple provenance tag on its meta.tag recording the originating federal file and last-checked date, so provenance travels with the data into the platform rather than living in separate documentation.
- How current is the provider data telehealth platforms rely on?
- Currency is set by each federal source's native cadence, and Fonteum mirrors it rather than introducing an opaque vendor refresh lag. CMS NPPES is ingested as a weekly full-replacement file, so the active-provider graph tracks the registry within days of publication. HRSA shortage-area designations refresh on HRSA's schedule, and the OIG LEIE exclusion list refreshes monthly. Every field records the date it was last checked against the federal portal, so a telehealth platform can show not just a provider attribute but when it was reconciled to the source. Across all , the /sources registry documents tier, refresh cadence, jurisdiction coverage, and redistribution posture, so a platform can confirm the freshness terms of any signal before relying on it in a routing decision.
- Is the data free, and what does the pilot tier add?
- The federal datasets behind telehealth routing — CMS NPPES, HRSA HPSA and MUA/MUP shortage areas, and the OIG exclusion lists — are published openly. The shortage-area surfaces are at /data/hrsa-hpsa-shortage-areas and /data/hrsa-mua-mup, the provider graph at /providers and /npi, and the research datasets with CSV and JSON downloads at /research. The FHIR R4 US Core 6.1.0 API and the HL7 bulk $export operation are documented at /docs/fhir. Free access reflects the doctrine that public-source federal data should stay public. The scoped pilot tier, starting at $2,500/mo, adds custom exports — for example an NPPES-plus-HPSA file scoped to the specialties and geographies your network serves, delivered on your refresh cadence with the field-level provenance intact. The pilot is about scoping, delivery, and integration support, not about gating access to the underlying federal record.
Request a provider-data pilot.
Scope an NPPES + HPSA export for your specialties and geographies. Free public data at /providers and /data/hrsa-hpsa-shortage-areas. Pilot tier from $2,500/mo.
- /data/hrsa-hpsa-shortage-areas → HRSA HPSA primary-care, dental, and mental-health shortage areas.
- /data/hrsa-mua-mup → Medically Underserved Areas and Populations.
- /docs/fhir → FHIR R4 US Core 6.1.0 endpoint reference and CapabilityStatement.
- /use-cases/patient-portals → Source-attested provider profiles for find-a-doctor surfaces.