This article will cover what provider groups are useful for along with how to create and edit them.

Why create provider groups?

Provider groups are useful concepts to name a collection of NPIs, EINs you spent time researching. We cover the ins-and-outs of why a provider group may have multiple NPIs, EINs you need to grab to generate results in our provider search guide but "groups" is a useful way to save that work and apply it inside Signal.

For example, if you wanted to research a nationwide group, you could see multiple NPIs / EINs by region:

In addition, each of these NPIs may cross-walk to a unique EIN. Once you have done all the work to figure out the right EINs, NPIs, provider groups is the mechanism to keep those EINs, NPIs together as one provider unit and apply them to future searches + reports.

Creating and editing provider groups

Let's say you want to research oncology groups in Texas.

First, use our provider search guide to find the right EINs, NPIs to grab for your oncology groups of interest so they appear under "Your Selections":

Then click on "Group X selected providers" to add selected NPIs / EINs to existing groups or create a new provider group.

• Creating a new group requires you specify a name for the group and then auto-adds the EIN or NPI you have selected to the named group of choice

If you want to see which groups you have, you can find them in the providers panel along with the ability to search for specific groups:

Each group will have an ellipses button. Once clicked, you would be able to:

1. Delete the group (bottom right hand side corner)

2. Remove EINs, NPIs inside the group

3. Re-name the group

Using provider groups

With your groups created and refined, you can leverage them in several modes in Signal, most notably Peer Rates.

Please note the following for groups containing multiple EINs and NPIs:

• Peer Rates mode only performs searches on entries in the 'EIN' field. This means we do not search NPIs in provider groups.

• For each payer and code, Peer Rates will aggregate across all the relevant 'EIN' entries in the provider group. For example, let's say your provider group has 2 EINs: '871927518', '841856765' and you search 90837 in Cigna:

  

  • The raw data has 3 entries: 1 for EIN 871927518 (top row) and 2 for EIN 841856765 (bottom two rows).

  • In Peer Rates, you will see the following result depending on which aggregation method you choose:

    • Most NPIs: This will grab the last row with 6745 npi's and return the rate as $109

    • Min: This will grab the second row with 1 npi in Colorado and return the rate as $74

    • Max: This will grab the first row with 1419 npis and return the rate as $109

Unlike Peer Rates, using provider groups in Explore mode will not aggregate the data in any way across the EINs, NPIs you select or re-name a provider group for you.

Instead, a provider group in search mode only passes the NPIs, EINs you specified as filters in the providers panel to retrieve the correct raw data.

Given you are in search mode, you must also specify which payers you want to select — which is not a requirement in Peer Rates.