Directory API Overview
At the highest level, our Directory API is subdivided into two categories: Providers and Organizations. This corresponds to the CMS categorization of National Provider Identifiers (NPIs) into Type 1 - individuals and Type 2 - organizations. While all NPIs are categorically considered to be "providers", our convention is to refer to individual providers as "Providers" and organization providers as "Organizations."
These are individual healthcare workers such as a specific surgeon or nurse. Each provider is uniquely identified by their Type 1 NPI. Provider data is found via the /providers/ endpoints such as Lookup a provider by npi.
These are business entities such as hospitals, physician groups or skilled nursing facilities. Each Organization can be associated with multiple Type 2 NPIs in the same way you would expect to see multiple departments within a hospital building. Because a Type 2 NPI will not uniquely identify these entities, Organizations are uniquely identified by an internally assigned organization_id. Our Organization data is found via the /organizations/ endpoints such as Lookup an organization by organization_id.
Updated 6 months ago
Read more about our Provider and Organization endpoints.