Method

How a practice gets on the record.

Seven steps. The first sources are public. The website is accepted only when the page corroborates the registry identity. Unknown is allowed at every step.

01

Registries in

NPPES publishes a weekly file of clinician identifiers. CMS publishes Medicare clinician data monthly. Open places data adds location candidates that can share a phone and a ZIP.1

These sources describe clinicians and places. They do not, by themselves, describe a practice website, a published email, or who owns the office.

02

Resolve entities

A clinician, a legal organization, an operating brand, and a location are different things.2 The pipeline keeps them separate and joins them when the evidence agrees: a shared site of practice, a consistent brand, a provider listed at that address.

A shared phone number or a shared building is a candidate relationship, not a merge.3 Conflicting suites, brands, or specialties stay in review.

03

Find the practice's own site

Places that share a phone, and search when that is not enough, propose candidate domains. A directory listing is a clue. It is never accepted as the practice's own website.4

A domain guessed from the brand name stays a hypothesis until the page is fetched and read. A successful HTTP response proves that a server answered, nothing more.

04

Verify identity on the page

A site is attached to a location only when the page itself corroborates the registry identity. The conservative rule is a matching phone plus name or address, or the provider's name plus street and locality, in the same page context.5

A name on one page and a city in a national footer does not count. If the page contradicts the target, a different state, a provider who has left, a conflicting suite, the site is not accepted.

05

Read what the practice publishes

From a matched site, the pipeline reads published services, team names, locations, hours, booking links, contact forms, and technology fingerprints such as a patient portal or a scheduling tool.6

Emails are kept only when they appear on that page. They are not invented from a name and a domain. A vendor or developer address that is not the practice's channel is left out.

06

Assign confidence

Each field can carry a status. Confirmed means the evidence met the identity rule or came straight from the registry field it cites. Seen on website means the practice published it and the quote was stored. Possible match means a candidate that has not cleared the rule.7

Unknown stays empty. A missing website is "not resolved", not "they do not have one".

07

Watch for change

Weekly registry diffs and later site checks emit events: provider added, moved, or deactivated; phone changed; website found; group size changed.8 You can subscribe instead of re-pulling the country.

A quiet week means we did not observe a change. It is not proof that nothing changed.

Limits

What we will not do.

  • Guess an email from a name and a domain.
  • Treat a directory or a listing site as the practice's own website.
  • Merge two practices because they share a phone.
  • Treat an authorized official on an NPI record as a verified owner.
  • Fill an unknown ownership, website, or contact with a plausible value.
  • Store patient information. There is no PHI in this product.
  1. NPPES weekly files and CMS Medicare clinician data are public registries. Open places data contributes location candidates. None of these, alone, is the practice website.
  2. The pipeline models providers, legal organizations, operating brands, and locations as separate objects, with membership over time.
  3. A shared address or telephone is a candidate relationship. Conflicting suites, brands, ownership, or specialties are not silently merged.
  4. Directory and listing URLs can suggest a candidate. They are never stored as the official website of the location.
  5. Identity requires corroboration on the page: matching phone plus name or address, or provider name plus street and locality, in the same page context.
  6. Extraction quotes the captured page. A model does not browse on its own during that step, and a quote that is not in the page is rejected.
  7. Statuses are verified, observed, and candidate. Thresholds are conservative and versioned. They are not a calibrated accuracy rate.
  8. Events fire from registry diffs and from site checks. Delivery is by the API, webhooks, and bulk files depending on plan.

Read a record with the method in mind.

Get a key, read a record, and widen the query when the shape is right.