National Plan and Provider Enumeration System

Acronym: NPPES

The National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) serves as the national system designed to assign unique identifiers to health care providers and health plans who apply for the National Provider Identifier (NPI). NPIs are being used across the health care industry and government health care programs. NPPES contains information that is used to uniquely identify the health care provider and health plan. The system contains a unique identifier for each health care provider (the NPI, which is assigned by the NPPES) along with other information about the provider including: Provider Name, Gender, Social Security Number (SSN), Tax Identification Number(TIN), Individual Tax Payer Identification Number(ITIN), Date of Birth (DOB), Place of Birth, Address and Phone numbers, professional and commercial data. Additionally, demographics like race and ethnicity may be stored as optional fields.