Physician Directory + NPI Cross-Reference

Healthcare M&A volume cleared $1B+ in 2025 across PE rollups (TUSK Practice Sales, Practice Transitions Group). DSO deal flow alone was 10+ practices/month in September 2025. Every one of those buyers needs the same thing: a clean physician contact list with NPI, specialty, primary practice address, license number, and a working email pattern. This actor returns that record on demand at per-call pricing.

Why this exists

Definitive Healthcare sells the physician directory market at $25,000-$100,000 per seat per year. That's the price umbrella for every healthcare-M&A team, PE rollup, MedSpa broker, and physician-recruitment firm that needs the same dataset. The NPI Registry has been free public data from CMS since 2007. Healthgrades, Vitals, and ZocDoc are public-web. State medical license boards are searchable in every US state. The data is there. Nobody has wired it into a single per-call API that returns one normalized record.

This actor does that. NPI Registry as the spine. State medical license board cross-reference for live status verification. Email guess generator for outreach. One call, one record, $0.05-$0.25 per row depending on enrichment level.

How it works

/search?specialty=&state=             /enrich?npi=
                       |                                  |
                       v                                  v
            +----------+----------+              +--------+----------+
            |  NPI Registry CMS   |              |  NPI Registry CMS  |
            |  (public, free)     |              |  (single lookup)   |
            +----------+----------+              +--------+----------+
                       |                                  |
                       |  normalized                      |  normalized
                       v                                  v
                   results[]                          npiRecord
                       |                                  |
                       |                                  v
                       |                         +--------+----------+
                       |                         |  CA Med Board     |
                       |                         |  (search.dca.ca)  |
                       |                         |  via VPS Go TLS   |
                       |                         +--------+----------+
                       |                                  |
                       |                                  |  license + status
                       |                                  v
                       |                         +--------+----------+
                       |                         |  Email Guesser    |
                       |                         |  (6 patterns x 3  |
                       |                         |   domain seeds)   |
                       |                         +--------+----------+
                       v                                  v
                +------+------+                  +--------+--------+
                | basic record |                 | enriched record |
                | $0.05/row    |                 | $0.25/row       |
                +-------------+                  +-----------------+

Endpoints

Method	Path	Description	Charge
GET	/	Service info, pricing, source list	none
GET	/health	Liveness check	none
GET	/search?specialty=&state=&city=&limit=	Search NPI Registry, return basic records	$0.05 per result
GET	/enrich?npi=	Single NPI -> full enrichment	$0.25 per record
GET	/enrich?name=&state=	Name + state -> NPI lookup -> enrichment	$0.25 per record
POST	/enrich/bulk body {npis:[...]} (max 25)	Bulk enrichment	$0.25 per record

Quick start

# Search by specialty + state
curl -s "https://george-the-developer--physician-directory-npi.apify.actor/search?specialty=Cardiology&state=CA&limit=10" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN"

# Enrich a single NPI
curl -s "https://george-the-developer--physician-directory-npi.apify.actor/enrich?npi=1710071717" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN"

# Bulk enrich (max 25 NPIs)
curl -s -X POST "https://george-the-developer--physician-directory-npi.apify.actor/enrich/bulk" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"npis":["1710071717","1528076718","1962778159"]}'

Sample response

{
  "ok": true,
  "record": {
    "npi": "1710071717",
    "name": "ABDUL SATTAR ABBASI",
    "credentials": "MD",
    "specialty": "Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular Disease",
    "specialty_group": "Other",
    "taxonomy_code": "207RC0000X",
    "primary_address": {
      "street": "1045 ATLANTIC AVE, SUITE 912",
      "city": "LONG BEACH",
      "state": "CA",
      "zip": "908133408",
      "phone": "562-437-2801",
      "fax": ""
    },
    "license": {
      "state": "CA",
      "license_number": "A24632",
      "status": "unknown",
      "note": "Cross-referenced from NPI taxonomy. Verify live status at search.dca.ca.gov if critical."
    },
    "email_guesses": [
      { "email": "abdul.abbasi@abbasimd.com", "verified": false },
      { "email": "aabbasi@abbasimd.com", "verified": false },
      { "email": "abdul.abbasi@abbasiinternalmedicine.com", "verified": false }
    ],
    "enumeration_date": "2010-06-01",
    "last_updated": "2024-12-01",
    "status": "A",
    "source": {
      "npi_registry": "https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/api/?version=2.1&number=1710071717",
      "state_license_board": "https://search.dca.ca.gov/results?BOARDCODE=8002&LICENSETYPE=A&..."
    }
  }
}

Pricing

Event	Price	What you get
apify-actor-start	$0.10 per run (per GB memory)	Standby instance warm
physician-discovered	$0.05 per record	NPI + name + specialty + primary practice address (search results)
physician-enriched	$0.25 per record	Full enrichment: NPI + state license cross-reference + 6 email guesses + all taxonomies + other identifiers

For comparison: Definitive Healthcare seats run $25K-$100K/yr. At $0.25/record, you can pull 100,000 enriched physician records for $25,000 once. That's the price umbrella this is sitting under.

Use cases

• PE healthcare rollups building target lists across states for cardiology, orthopedics, dermatology, primary care, dental practice acquisition
• MedSpa M&A brokers identifying medical directors and specialty practice owners for M&A outreach
• Physician recruitment firms building active-license verified provider lists by specialty + region
• Medical sales reps prospecting providers in target specialties (device manufacturers, pharma, RCM)
• Healthcare research firms academic and competitive-intel firms running provider-density analyses
• Provider credentialing teams verifying NPI + license + practice address in one call

Honest tradeoffs (v1)

• State license live status: v1 wires CA Medical Board (search.dca.ca.gov) live cross-reference. CA-MBC sits behind an F5 WAF that intermittently blocks Chrome-fingerprinted requests. When the live check returns 0 rows, the actor falls back to the NPI Registry taxonomy license number with status:"unknown" and a note. FL, NY, TX coming in v2.
• Healthgrades / Vitals / ZocDoc: deferred to v2. Healthgrades and Vitals require Cloudflare bypass, ZocDoc requires Datadome bypass. Adding them is the work for v2 once the v1 dataset proves the demand.
• Email guessing: the 6 patterns generated are unverified guesses. The note on each guess says so. Pair them with my Email Validator API for SMTP-grade verification before sending outreach.
• NPI Registry specialty filter: the public CMS API does substring match on taxonomy_description. A search for "Cardiology" returns Cardiologist MDs (taxonomy 207RC0000X) plus pharmacists with cardiology certs (1835C0206X). Filter by taxonomy_code prefix 207RC for MD-only cardiologists.
• Org NPIs (NPI-2): included in search but enrichment treats them as the legal entity. For physician-level outreach, filter by enumeration_type:"NPI-1".

Test-payload short-circuit

Pass NPI 1234567890 or 0000000001 or 9999999999, or name John Doe Test, and the actor returns {ok:true, mocked:true} with no charge. Use these for CI smoke tests without burning credit.

curl -s "https://george-the-developer--physician-directory-npi.apify.actor/enrich?_test=true&npi=0000000001" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN"
# {"ok":true,"mocked":true,"reason":"test-payload short-circuit, NPI Registry skipped"}

More from this developer

• Email Validator API — pair with email guesses for SMTP verification ($0.002 per check)
• Domain WHOIS Lookup — pull practice domain registration ($0.005 per domain)
• Company Enrichment API — full company profile from a domain ($0.01 per company)
• Obituary Life-Insurance Lead Scraper — sister actor for final-expense insurance prospecting
• Funded Startup Tracker — TC RSS + SEC EDGAR fusion for VC outreach
• ATS Hire-Trigger Intent Scraper — Greenhouse + Lever + Ashby intent signals
• Shopify DTC Brand Discovery — DTC brand finder + Klaviyo tech-stack detection

Built by George The Developer. Source-of-record at github.com/the-ai-entrepreneur-ai-hub/physician-directory-npi-docs.