AINPI·ainpi.dev
NDH·2026-06-09
Release update · 2026-06-09

The phone is on the record.Not the location.

Phone on record
99.98%
Active practitioners
7.2M
No phone anywhere
1,115

H43 published: practitioner phone-number reachability. 99.98% of active practitioners carry a phone directly on the Practitioner record; the role/location traversal adds nothing.

Read the full report →
methodology v0.7.2-draftNDH 2026-06-09

2026-06-09 update: practitioner phone numbers are on the record, not the location

Some numbers here have moved. This update measures the 2026-05-08 release. The finding that practitioners carry a phone directly on the record still holds at 2026-08-20, at 99.97%. The claim below that the location path returns nothing does not: Location.telecom was empty in May and now carries a phone for 79.0% of the 2,535,686 location records. See the 2026-08-21 update for what changed.

New finding published: H43: practitioner phone-number reachability. It answers a practical question: can you associate a practitioner in the NDH bulk export with a phone number, and which FHIR resource do you read to get it?

What we measured

A phone can live in three places in FHIR R4 / the NDH IG:

  1. Practitioner.telecom: on the individual's record
  2. PractitionerRole.telecom: on the role
  3. Location.telecom: the practice location, via PractitionerRole.location → Location

We pre-registered the expectation that Practitioner.telecom would be sparse, because NPPES (the upstream of most of these fields) keeps practice phone on the location. Under that prior, finding a phone means traversing role → location.

Result: the prior was wrong

Metric2026-05-08 release
Active Practitioner resources7,196,385
Phone directly on Practitioner.telecom7,195,270 (99.98%)
Reachable only via role / location0
No phone on any of the three resources1,115 (0.015%)

NDH carries a phone directly on the Practitioner record for essentially every active practitioner. The traversal adds nothing. A "call this provider" feature can read Practitioner.telecom straight off the record.

Caveats

  • On-record telecom is phone + fax only. email, url, and the location-phone path all came back empty in this release. Verify before relying on those channels.
  • The 2026-05-08 release deduped Location resources by 61% vs April, so the location-path number is release-sensitive. The headline doesn't depend on it.

Compute script: analysis/h43_practitioner_phone.py (BigQuery, capped per-query). Output JSON: /api/v1/findings/practitioner-phone-reachability.json. Finding page: /findings/practitioner-phone-reachability.

AINPI, 2026-06-09 · methodology 0.7.2-draft