Study Finds NPI Registry Data on Eye Care Professionals' Offices Highly Accurate

Accuracy rate reaches 97 percent for optometrist locations sampled in NPI data.

Dallas, Texas, February 11, 2008—Optometrists' offices data in the federal government's National Provider Identifier database is highly accurate and up-to-date, a study by Armeta Solutions suggests.

"That's good news for companies that rely on the NPI registry to ensure billing goes smoothly," said Ted Ingram, a senior consultant at Armeta Solutions and coordinator of the study. The NPI is a unique identifying number for every covered medical provider in the United States. It was mandated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and will be the only acceptable means of identifying providers for billing as of May 23, 2008.

The Dallas-based consulting company found that 97 percent of the records sampled for eye care professionals' offices had sufficient contact information:

• 85 percent of the data sampled had accurate phone numbers, addresses and business names
• 8 percent had the correct phone number and address but the business name had changed or was entered incorrectly
• 4 percent had the correct phone number and business name but the location had changed.

"This is recently entered data, so it makes sense that it would have high accuracy," Mr. Ingram said. "But other studies have cast doubt on the NPI data, and we wanted to see how reliable it truly was. It will be important for all parties involved to keep this data accurate as we go forward."

The study included 391 randomly chosen optometrist locations from the NPI registry. They were contacted the week of Jan. 28, and the business name, phone number and address were verified. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 4 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.

About Armeta

Armeta strives to help clients become forward-thinking businesses where people are decision-makers not data assemblers. We bring together the team and tools to turn your data into information that generates unique business insights.

###