Some Updates on Health System Affiliation

It's been a minute.

I wanted to provide an update for anyone that does work on affiliation or has to answer these kinds of questions:

• Which healthcare system is this practice a part of?
• Who is affiliated with this practice?
• How many practices are affiliated with this hospital?
• Which healthcare professionals are working at this health system?

I get questions fairly routinely about how to do this with the NPI data alone. The NPI does provide practice location information and it provides information about organizations or clinic sites and pharmacies, as well. However, other than using address, fax, or telephone information to link professionals to a specific site, this doesn't provide information about health systems. Fortunately, there are easier ways to do this.

I mentioned some time ago that AHRQ was planning to update its Compendium of U.S. Health Systems, which was done in June and then publicized in a useful webinar in July. In that webinar, AHRQ promises to add more metadata to the health systems and make more frequent updates.

These CHSP files provide some metadata on health systems, and links hospitals and group practices to each system using common identifiers: CCN for Hospitals, and PAC ID for practices. The data source combine information from HCRIS reporting and IQVIA.

At the same time, CMS has been helping out by providing a version of the Compare data that has individual NPI linked to Group Practice PAC ID (the standard Compare dataset), and a flat file with Individual NPI affiliation to hospitals.

CMS Compare's National Downloadable File contains 1:N NPI to Group Practice (so any individual who works at more than one Group Practice appears in the National Downloadable File more than once). The new Compare Facility Affiliation contains 1:N NPI to CCN for any facility that individual is associated with (Hospital, LTCF, Dialysis Center, etc.)

I've included a table below that shows the fields that are in each of these files and provided an asterisks for the keys.

Essentially, to take an individual professional and link them to a healthcare system, take their NPI, use Compare to find either their group practice's PAC ID, or their hospital CCN using the Facility Affiliation file. From there, you can use the CHSP linking group practice or hospital to healthcare system.

Let me know if this helps or you have some interesting case studies using this data.