This is going to be a relatively short article and we’ll be showing you where, as a health care provider, to edit your information in the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System.
Personal information is everywhere and if it’s public, it typically is sucked up by data aggregating sites like Spokeo, Radaris, Intelius, etc. The same is true if you’re a healthcare provider. Sites like nipno.com, Zocdoc, Healthguides and several others pull your information associated with your National Provider Identifier (NIP) number. This would include information like office location, specialties, and how someone can contact you.
All of these sites have one thing in common, they are sometimes difficult, if not impossible to get rid of this information on them. For example, this is data aggregator HippaSpace’s [https://www.hipaaspace.com/content/faq.html ] policy on removing the public data they collect.
Why my personal information is published on your website in NPI profile?
Some times Healthcare Providers are not very accurate about their personal information like home address or home phone number and they put this information to the Practice Location or Practice Phone Number fields of NPI profile. Unfortunately, there is no way for us to tell whether the address is your home address or actual address of your business. And, as it was told in the answer above, we cannot change the information on our own. So, should you notice that your NPI profile contain any information you consider to be personal, please contact the agency that issued you NPI number immediately, so they can apply the correction.
In some cases we can remove some information temporarily upon your request if you prove you identity, but we take the right of refusing doing that if we do not consider the situation to be critical.
Please, understand that we are the proven source of official information and official information cannot be changed without official authorization.
In short, they are saying that they will not remove such information unless they deem a situation as critical.
We recently had someone raise the concern that there are healthcare practitioners who work with patients who can pose a physical threat to them and they were frustrated that their personal information is included in these healthcare data aggregation sites. This is why it’s important to make this information important. It’s equally important that there are stronger federal laws allowing citizens to control their data to prevent someone from finding out personal stuff in order to harass or cause physical harm.
So, for the healthcare professionals that are looking to update, or attempt to remove, personal information, it has to be done through HHS. The link to the database is https://nppes.cms.hhs.gov/#/ For help with NPI related stuff visit the FAQ HHS has at https://nppes.cms.hhs.gov/webhelp/nppeshelp/NPPES%20FAQS.html
Once this is updated, the data aggregating sites will eventually crawl this database and update their information. It can take Google from a few days, weeks, or even months to update their search results to reflect the updates you make.
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