NPI File Names

[Loran Cook]

Posted on behalf of my co-worker, Wen Nutt. He manages our current monthly NPI updates.

Currently the Monthly Full Update is named inconsistently from month to month, some months are abbreviated (NPPES_Data_Dissemination_Apr_2014.zip) while others are not(NPPES_Data_Dissemination_August_2014.zip). I would like to suggest two possible solutions to make it easier to pragmatically access the NPI data files.

A) Consistent Naming Convention

Name files by four digit Year and two digit numeric month(examples below) would make predicting the download url far more consistent.

Monthly Full Replacement

NPPES_Monthly_2014_07.zip

NPPES_Monthly_2014_08.zip

Monthly Deactivation

NPPES_Monthly_Deactivated_2014_07.zip

NPPES_Monthly_Deactivated_2014_08.zip

Weekly Incremental

NPPES_Weekly_2014_08_04.zip

NPPES_Weekly_2014_08_11.zip

B) Permanent/Fixed URL

Since only the current files are available for download, a permanent or fixed URL could be a simple solution as long as the last modified time can be attained from a headers only request. Something like the above file names without the trailing '_YYYY_MM(_DD)'.

Here is an example using curl to retrieve only the headers for the current Monthly Full Replacement file

 

$ curl -I http://nppes.viva-it.com/NPPES_Data_Dissemination_August_2014.zip
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies: all
Content-Type: application/zip
X-Pad: avoid browser bug
Age: 53716
 
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 18:56:30 GMT
 
Last-Modified: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 20:25:17 GMT
Content-Length: 478098456
Connection: keep-alive

Here is an example of a file from CMS(CMS-2552-10 FY2014) where the header does not contain a Last-Modified or similar attribute.

 

$ curl -I http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Files-for-Order/CostReports/Cost-Reports-by-Fiscal-Year-Items/HOSPITAL10-DL-2014.html
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 30686
Content-Type: text/html
Server:  
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 18:56:31 GMT
Set-Cookie: cms.gov=3926133258.20480.0000; path=/

[Darrell DeVeaux]

Yup. We've always had to download and rename to a standard name so we could process files.

Since the current vendor already has their contract, I don't think we will see any changes to the file format though until contract is rebid.