Context The CMS National Plan and Provider Enumeration System ([NPPES][1]) was developed as part of the Administrative Simplification provisions in the original HIPAA act. The primary purpose of NPPES was to develop a unique identifier for each physician that billed medicare and medicaid. This identifier is now known as the National Provider Identifier Standard ([NPI][2]) which is a required 10 digit number that is unique to an individual provider at the national level. Once an NPI record is assigned to a healthcare provider, parts of the NPI record that have public relevance, including the provider’s name, speciality, and practice address are published in a searchable website as well as downloadable file of zipped data containing all of the FOIA disclosable health care provider data in NPPES and a separate PDF file of code values which documents and lists the descriptions for all of the codes found in the data file. Content The dataset contains the latest NPI downloadable file in an easy to query BigQuery table, npi_raw. In addition, there is a second table, npi_optimized which harnesses the power of Big Query’s next-generation columnar storage format to provide an analytical view of the NPI data containing description fields for the codes based on the mappings in Data Dissemination Public File - Code Values [documentation][3] as well as external lookups to the healthcare provider taxonomy [codes][4] . While this generates hundreds of columns, BigQuery makes it possible to process all this data effectively and have a convenient single lookup table for all provider information. Fork [this kernel][5] to get started. Acknowledgements https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/bigquery-public-data:nppes?_ga=2.117120578.-577194880.1523455401 https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/hhs/nppes?filter=category:science-research Dataset Source: Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This dataset is publicly available for anyone to use under the following terms provided by the Dataset Source - http://www.data.gov/privacy-policy#data_policy — and is provided "AS IS" without any warranty, express or implied, from Google. Google disclaims all liability for any damages, direct or indirect, resulting from the use of the dataset. Banner Photo by [@rawpixel from Unplash][6]. Inspiration What are the top ten most common types of physicians in Mountain View? What are the names and phone numbers of dentists in California who studied public health? [1]: https://nppes.cms.hhs.gov/#/ [2]: https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Administrative-Simplification/NationalProvIdentStand/ [3]: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByNnBOdRY8TtMFJ1eW5kLV82WU0 [4]: http://www.nucc.org/index.php/code-sets-mainmenu-41/provider-taxonomy-mainmenu-40/csv-mainmenu-57 [5]: https://www.kaggle.com/paultimothymooney/starter-kernel-for-nppes-dataset [6]: https://unsplash.com/photos/w9YHKTK-wLo