National Provider Identifier (NPI)

All health care providers were required to apply/sign up on the National Provider Identifier website.  The process was set in motion in 1996, by Congress by the passing the HIPPA Act.  After signing up the provider is assigned a 10 digit number, known as a ther NPI number, the old Medicare numbers are referred to as legacy numbers. Most providers signed up over the last year or two, however,  files were just made available from CMS's website in September 2007, way after the numbers were mandatory.  CMS also provided a lookup web page where you can lookup a provider's number by name, state, NPI number and other ways.  But as usual, this web site has been overloaded and can be slow to find names.  So, we downloaded the 2 gigabyte file and set about to make it part of a sql server database we have here at Softcare, but rapidly it was apparent that the file was TOO big to manage and, it had some rather unpleasant corruption. The file is a csv text file, with only text,  187 fields delimited by the comma and text enclosed in quotations.  The programmers that unloaded the NPI database in to the csv format made a fatal mistake, an amature mistake.  They did not scrub the text fields before unloading.  As a result the files contain quotation with in the quotation of the text fields and most import facilities provided by common programs such as Microsoft Access or Sql Server will choke on these files.  So the first thing we did is scrub the file, by writing a program to find the offending quotations. Then the size which approaches 2 gigabytes, needed to be seperated in to smaller state files, for subsequent import in to Access and Sql Server.  I also bzip2 compressed the files.  Bzip is way more efficient than plain zip. The latest version of Winzip can handle bzip2 files so if you do not have it go get it at www.winzip.com The individual state files will be available for download below. Register to download.  We need a valid email address!!!