Where our information comes from

Provider and facility identity — the NPI Registry

The National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES), run by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), assigns every US health care provider a National Provider Identifier (NPI). Its public data file is our foundation for names, credentials, specialties (taxonomy codes), practice addresses, and phone numbers — for individual providers and for organizations like hospitals and clinics.

The current directory was built from the October 2026 NPPES release (imported Oct 14, 2026): 4.7 million individual providers and 285,749 organizations. We leave out deactivated NPIs and records without a US practice address.

How we turn registry data into listings

• Specialties. Providers register with official taxonomy codes (from the National Uniform Claim Committee). We map those codes to plain-language specialties — for example, “Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular Disease” becomes Cardiology.
• Facility types. Organization records are included when their taxonomy code identifies a care site, such as a hospital, urgent care center, lab, or imaging center. Billing-only organizations and suppliers are left out.
• Locations and distance. Each listing is placed at the center of its ZIP code using U.S. Census Bureau ZIP Code Tabulation Areas, so distances are approximate. City pages use Census place names.
• Duplicate registrations. Hospitals and clinics often hold several NPI numbers — for departments, billing, or after a name change. When registrations share a name and a location, we show the place once and list the other registrations on its page.
• Names and addresses. The registry stores most text in capital letters; we convert it to normal capitalization for readability, which occasionally gets an unusual name wrong.

What public data can't tell you

The NPI Registry is self-reported by providers and isn't always current — people move, retire, or change practices without updating it. It also doesn't include which insurance plans a provider accepts, whether they're accepting new patients, office hours, or quality information. Always call the office to confirm before you go.

Claimed profiles

Providers and practices will be able to claim their profile after verification and add a bio, languages, focus areas, office hours, and whether they're accepting new patients. That content will be labeled as provided by the practice.

Photos and hospital facts

Hospital photos come from Wikimedia Commons, the free media library behind Wikipedia, and are used under their open licenses (public domain, CC0, CC BY, or CC BY-SA). Every photo shows its author and license, and links to its source. We match photos to hospitals by name and location, publish only confident matches, and hold uncertain ones for review. Official websites, founding years, and bed counts come from Wikidata, which is public domain.

We never copy images from hospital websites or other directories. Later, providers and facilities will be able to supply their own photos. When we don't have a photo, we show an illustration of the type of facility instead.

How results are ordered

• Name searches are ranked by how closely the name matches.
• Specialty and location searches are ordered by distance from you.
• Payment, claimed status, and subscriptions never affect organic ranking.
• Any sponsored listing appears in a separate, clearly labeled slot — never mixed into organic results.

What we don't publish

We don't show patient reviews or star ratings from patients, and we don't ask search engines to index every possible combination of specialty and city. A landing page is only offered to search engines when it has enough real listings to be useful.

Report a correction

Spotted something wrong? Tell us and we'll review it. Because listings come from the NPI Registry, providers should also update their record in NPPES so the fix reaches every site that uses it. You can also email contact@discoverpointmedical.com.