Preferred Structures For Cleaned-Up Doctor Data

Which data formats should the DocGraph project support?

The DocGraph project has an interesting issue that I think will become a common one as  the open data movement continues. For those that have not been keeping up, DocGraph was announced at Strata RX, described carefully on this blog, and will be featured again at Strata 2013. For those that do not care to click links, DocGraph is a crowdfunded open data set, which merges open data sources on doctors and hospitals.

As I recently described on the DocGraph mailing list, work is underway to acquire the data sets that we set out to merge. The issue deals with file formats.

The core identifier for doctors, hospitals and other healthcare entities is the National Provider Identifier (NPI). This is something like a Social Security number for doctors and hospitals. [...]