The NPPES provider registry
The national NPI registry — every Type 1 and Type 2 provider, their taxonomy, and practice address, with field-level provenance.
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 signs each field back to its source, so a provider record reads as a single answer you can re-derive on demand.
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 every federal dataset
The full data catalog — each source page is a standalone, citable surface with its own stat and table.
Open →Source families & cadence
Every source Fonteum ingests, with refresh cadence, jurisdiction coverage, and a displayability note.
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 →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 →How accurate are provider directories?
An analysis of stale and conflicting directory data across federal sources.
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 every field is sourced
The provenance contract and methodology behind each rendered value.
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?
- NPPES is the registry that issues and holds the NPI for every provider; PECOS is Medicare's enrollment system that records who is approved to bill Medicare and in what role. A provider can have an NPI in NPPES without being actively enrolled in PECOS, so a complete record needs both.
- How does Fonteum keep provider data current?
- Each source family is pulled on its own published cadence, the raw bytes are hashed and retained, and the change is folded into the entity graph. Every record carries the snapshot date of the file it came from, so you can see how fresh each field is and read it as of a past date.
- 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, and each linked assertion keeps the source row and snapshot it came from. 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 one provider, resolved across every federal source.
Look up an NPI free, or request access to call the API and get a signed, source-traced provider record.