HIPAA Blog

[ Tuesday, June 26, 2007 ]

 

NPI confusion: I recently had lunch with a client who told me that her local medical society was advising local physicians to closely guard their MPIs. I gotta say, I don't understand this. Physicians who see a patient pursuant to a referral will need the NPI of the referring physician to get paid. I believe CMS even used the tag line, "get it, use it, share it" to encourage providers to get signed up. There's even this FAQ for the question, "with whom should I share my NPI?" Still, however, some providers think they need to protect their NPI like it's their social security number (most of those physicians also use their patients' social security numbers for their patient identifiers, too).

Anyway, CMS is about to publish in the Federal Register the information it will make available to the general public under the Freedom of Information Act out of the NPI applications of all providers. Except for social and DOB, everything, including the NPI itself, is available to the general public. So stop trying to keep it a secret!

Jeff [3:16 PM]

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