The Census Bureau has conducted a systematic assessment of its data assets and capabilities to identify opportunities for delivering new insights on the functioning of the country’s healthcare system. This work has evolved into the construction of a prototype Medical Provider Data Frame (MP Frame), which uses novel data linkages of dozens of federal administrative datasets to offer new data on physician and nurse practitioner demographics, career trajectories, employer characteristics, and the increasingly complex organizational relationships between clinicians and their places of work.

Specifically, the Medical Provider Data Frame, for the first time, brings together restricted microdata from the following sources:

• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) data: to identify and describe physicians and nurse practitioners in the United States.
• Census Bureau demographic data: to obtain information on medical provider demographics, income, and the communities they serve.
• Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data: to uniquely link medical providers to their affiliated businesses (via employment, ownership, or self-employment) using annual tax records, rather than by relying on claims data or self-reported directories traditionally used to identify these relationships.
• Census Bureau business data: to characterize medical providers’ places of work and the institutions through which they provide care, including detailed information about their size, industry, legal form of organization, locations, and organizational structures.

Working alongside the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and academic partners, the EHealth team enhances the MP Frame by incorporating additional detailed information on nurse practitioners and emergency departments. These linked data offer new and enhanced statistics on physicians and nurse practitioners, their affiliated institutions, and their role in the healthcare system across time. Placed within the context of community data, the MP Frame provides an opportunity to examine how medical providers and access to care are impacted by industry consolidation, state-level policy variations, and community socio-economic characteristics. The MP Frame is expected to offer a valuable new tool for enhancing healthcare delivery, informing workforce planning, and analyzing the healthcare industry.