Provider Data Sources Reference

Last week (May 3, 2024) CarePrecise published a dynamic new healthcare data resource, entitled the Provider Data Sources Reference Guide (or just "PDS" for short). By "dynamic" we mean that it will be continually updated, and it will grow with new entries relating to free and fee-based provider data sources.

Navigating public and private data sources is challenging and time consuming, and it's something that the CarePrecise resources team has been doing for decades. Opening our expertise to the public is built into the DNA of our company. We take pride in being the most open and transparent healthcare provider data vendor, and the Provider Data Sources Reference Guide is just the logical next step.

The PDS is free and publicly available, with listings of data sources, both public and proprietary. It's a great place to find clues about the data sources needed across the healthcare industry. Included are sources that we use to build our authoritative provider data packages, as well as others that can be integrated with data packages from CarePrecise and other vendors using the NPI, CCN and PAC ID unique identifiers, to augment and enhance value for our customers, the industry at large.

Our resources team accepts submissions for entries in the PDS, which are reviewed for quality, pertinence, and value of content. Direct links to the sources are included on the page, where possible.

Using the on-screen tools, listings can be sorted and filtered by Category (such as Physicians, Hospital/Medical Facility, Mental Health, etc.), and by Free, Fee-based, or Limited use sources.

The PDS is a companion to the CarePrecise U.S. Healthcare Administration and Information (USHAI) resources guide, which contains links to medical associations, healthcare IT, cost reduction, patient guidance information, and much more. Both public and proprietary sources are included, and the USHAI guide also accepts submissions from the industry. Note that submissions must come from the source of the information; submissions that come from a public relations agency or other third party are not considered for publication. Both the USHAI and the PDS consider limited commercial content of high quality, with inclusion at the discretion of CarePrecise.

Go here to submit a provider data source for the PDS reference guide. Go here for commercial submissions to the companion USHAI guide.

Point of Interest Hooks for All U.S. Healthcare Providers

There's a new world of data available from a new class of vendors that can be linked together by the establishment of a universal Point of Interest code that pegs the physical location (the "where") and in some cases even encodes the business name (the "who"). In CarePrecise provider databases, POI-encoded facility information identifies essentially every facility in the U.S. healthcare system, and makes it connectable to other datasets. 

Visitor Traffic Reporting

Want to know how much visitor traffic a given doctor's office gets in a week? That data is available from third party sources, and can be linked in to the CarePrecise provider data using the Placekey™ POI code that CarePrecise appends to almost every* address in the NPI Registry and beyond.

Placekey Integration

CarePrecise invested heavily in creating a system that updates approximately 8 million healthcare provider POI records every month, keeping up with changes in address, new providers, and dropping deactivated providers. Furthermore, CarePrecise keeps historical data for every month, so that location changes can be tracked over time. 

Note: CarePrecise also provides a separate database, Select Geo, that contains latitude and longitude for every geocode-compatible U.S. healthcare provider location in the federal National Provider Identifier registry. This is used in applications that calculate distances and travel time between provider locations, and between patients and prospective providers, such as doctor-finder sites.

The addition of Placekey to CarePrecise data enables a clearer view into healthcare sites — clinics, physician offices, outpatient facilities, hospitals, and the whole panoply of facility types. Because CarePrecise links individual practitioners to their affiliated practice group businesses and the hospitals they are affiliated with, rich patterns emerge when connecting CarePrecise provider networks data to visitor traffic and revenues data. 

Competitive Healthcare, Meet a New Challenge

Whereas the healthcare industry is aggressively competitive, with organizations suppressing intelligence to the fullest extent possible, these new business intelligence pathways represent an unprecedented level of visibility into provider practices vis a vis their patient volumes. Reasonable, actionable assumptions can be made on practices' patient base—despite their closely-held business information—when cross-referenced with the demographic, psychographic, and economic data available on visitor traffic.

*Not all address fields can be parsed to produce a Placekey code or geocode; in particular, street addresses in Puerto Rico use so many non-normalized (GPS readable) addresses. Even CarePrecise's proprietary CoLoCode (uniform address code) has difficulty with many such addresses, though GPS compatibility is not a factor in creation of the CoLoCode.