Note from Hugh
Medicare Weekly Update, May 29, 2007
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As of last week, hospitals are now required to report the NPI of the attending/ordering physician on all claims (subject to the NPI "contingency plan" provisions). This means that hospitals must obtain the NPI of every physician who orders services from the hospital. In the UPIN days, UPINs were fairly easy to obtain through the online UPIN database lookup. Currently there is no equivalent online lookup function for NPIs. However, last week CMS published the long awaited NPI Data Dissemination Notice (see below).
In the Data Dissemination Notice, CMS announced that it will make the NPI database available for download and electronic lookup via the Internet. The Internet address is expected to be announced on the CMS NPI web page within the next few weeks. I estimate that the NPI data will be available online sometime in early July. In the meantime, hospitals will have to ask each physician who orders services from the hospital to provide their NPI. Frankly, it is amazing to me that CMS did not make this data available by the NPI go live date. So much for "Administrative Simplification."
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