hello,
I went through the provider table in OMOP data model and could see that NPI is not a compuslory field. Just wanted to understand how does one identify unique provider if NPI field is not available, is it only done on the basis of Provider ID?
As OMOP provider table says that it should contain unique providers, just wanted to understand how does unique get identified in terms of data.
This question came up when we were doing the mapping as our source has multiple records for one provider with same NPI and there are multiple records for one provider with missing NPI.
Why not? If the provider_id is unique you have unique providers.
We cannot make it mandatory: The NPI is not available in every data source, it is not unique (some providers have several) and outside the United States it doesn’t exist.
Yes, that is common. Dedup them as best as you can. If a few providers remain ambiguous - so be it. We are doing observational research, not running an insurance company or hospital. If this is happening on a smal scale it won’t change the results of the typical analytic, e.g., stratification of some patient population by provider specialty.