Practice location versus mailing address

NPPES files distinguish a business practice location from a business mailing address. ProviderFront preserves both source concepts but does not display them the same way.

Practice locations can support geography, market, and change analysis. Even then, exact display is subject to a privacy rule: residential or private-looking locations can be reduced to city and state or suppressed.

Mailing addresses are stored separately and are non-public by default. A mailing address is never silently substituted for a missing practice location, because doing so can create inaccurate market claims and expose a private location.

Location changes are based on normalized address fingerprints across complete snapshots. A newly observed practice location means that location was absent from ProviderFront’s prior valid snapshot; it does not, by itself, confirm that a new site opened.