Two organizations are now offering prescriber files to help pharmacists populate their doctor files with the new national provider identifier (NPI) required under the HIPAA legislation.

The National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP ) has announced the availability of HCIdea v2.0, a relational database with more than 1.3 million prescribers that includes the crosswalking of the physician’s NPI to his or her DEA number.

The HCIdea database includes multiple addresses, legacy identifiers, DEA numbers, state license information, and the corresponding NPI. HCIdea also offers optional data-enhanced services available from Ingenix, its business partner, which are customized by subscriber and range from simple NPI population of proprietary databases to full data compare-and-correction services.

The Council is offering the database to Medicaid agencies for one year, with monthly updates, at no charge. In return, Medicaid agencies must agree to provide NCPDP, through Ingenix, with a file of prescriber Medicaid IDs in order to enable an NCPDP crosswalk of the NPI to Medicaid ID needed for some agencies.

The HCIdea online lookup lets pharmacies obtain prescriber address, phone, licensure, DEA, and NPI information using a web browser. For a demo go to www.HCIdeaLookUp.org and click on “watch the demo.”

The other organization that is providing a prescriber NPI database is Fort Worth, Texas-based PDX-NHIN . The company has entered into an agreement with Health Market Science (HMS) of Philadelphia to jointly market to PDX pharmacy system users the HMS Prescriber Master File. This file contains more than 1.8 million prescriber records, including more than 1 million with NPIs.

After determining that state license numbers would be required to adequately link to the NPI data, and that obtaining this information in a reasonable and timely manner from hundreds of different primary sources would be a challenge, the company decided to select HMS as its preferred provider of prescriber information. Jeff Farris, president of PDX-NHIN-Rx.com, says that HMS is “the recognized leader in providing prescriber information to the healthcare industry.”

The HMS database will be provided through NHIN and will allow PDX customers to access the information using PDX distributed processing, a real-time access feature of the PDX pharmacy system. Pharmacies can select and add missing prescriber records to a local database or select and update missing information on prescriber records.