Release of Tool for Parsing the Public NPPES Dissemination

[Alan Viars]

Through the process of conducting stakeholder interviews, several people pointed out that the current provider download file is difficult to use. One of the chief complaints I heard was the fact that taxonomy and license information was difficult to extract. People have asked for things like taxonomy codes, license information, and other identifiers to be put into their own CSV files so there is one item per line (instead of all provider information on one line).

The hope is that through the NPPES Modernization Project,a public API will exist to make it easy to query for this information. In the meantime however, I have developed a simple utility that creates several "flattened" CSV files from the original "wide file". You can install the tool using `pip` or download it from GitHub (https://github.com/hhsidealab/provider-data-tools).

Please see the README there for more information.