Modernizing National Health Care Provider Information with Document-Oriented Data Models

M O D E R N I Z I N G N AT I O N A L H E A LT H P R O V I D E R D ATA W I T H A D O C U M E N T M O D E L

ALAN V IARS PRESENTS

B A C K G R O U N D

• The Health and Human Services External Entrepreneur program focuses on high-risk and high-reward projects throughout HHS

• Modernization of National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) was presented by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to HHS and was subsequently selected for the program.

My presentation does not represent HHS, CMS, or the United States federal government.

Please do not misconstrue my comments as a CMS endorsement of MongoDB.

L E G A C Y N P P E S

• HIPAA mandated enumeration of all health providers. ~4.5M individuals and organizations.

• Most information is public. A public CSV can be downloaded.

• No API resulted in screen scraping.

• Change was expensive and difficult.

D O C U M E N T M O D E L A D VA N TA G E S

• All data for a given provider is stored in a single document, instead of spread across many rows and many tables (i.e. relational database).

• Easy to add new data as requirements evolve.

• The document is already in an API-friendly format.

• Technology agnostic.

D O C U M E N T M O D E L D I S A D VA N TA G E S

• Relational database technology is familiar in the enterprise. Tools such as MongoDB are “new”.

• Schema-less nature means data needs to be screened and vetted before passed into the database.

• Some built-in framework functionality that relies on relational database technology can be lost.

S O M E T I M E S Y O U F E E L L I K E A N U T. S O M E T I M E S Y O U D O N ' T.

• Often it’s not “either or”, it’s “both and”.

• Examine your use case. Do what makes sense.

• Often a hybrid solution makes good sense.

TA C K L I N G T H E P R O B L E M

• Create and publish a JSON document format to contain all necessary elements (ProviderJSON)

• Create an open source tool to vet inbound JSON documents to ensure documents comply with desired format (provider-data-tools)

• Separate public search application from the processing application

P R O V I D E R J S O N P S E U D O - E X A M P L E

{ “enumeration_type”=“NPI-1”, “number”: “1234567899”, “basic”: {“first_name”:”JAMES”, “last_name”: “kirk”, … } “addresses”: [{},{},…], “licenses” : [{},{},…], … }

TA C K L I N G T H E P R O B L E M

• Create a public read RESTFul API and a reusable framework for doing more of the same (django-djmongo).

• Create simple command line tools for converting CSV into JSON and importing JSON documents into MongoDB (json-data-tools).

5 M I N U T E , N O C O D E , A P I C R E AT I O NBEFORE ITS MILLER T IME, ITS DEMO T IME!

Q U E S T I O N S & A N S W E R STHANK YOU FOR L ISTENING!

- A L A N V I A R S , P R E S I D E N T O F V I D E N T I T Y ( F O R M E R H H S E N T R E P R E N E U R I N R E S I D E N C E )

Check out http://djmongo.com and http://npi.io for more information.