Telehealth enrollment: verify an NPI without rebuilding the registry client

Telehealth products usually ask for an NPI during credentialing or right before a visit. The upstream CMS NPI Registry answers that question, but the JSON is wide: multiple addresses, many taxonomies, and differences between individual (NPI-1) and organization (NPI-2) records.

A practical integration is a single GET with an API key, for example GET /api/v1/npi/{npi} with the ten-digit identifier and Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY. A 200 response includes a normalized provider object (entity type, name fields, addresses, primary taxonomy) suitable for display and audit trails. A 404 with code npi_not_found is still a successful round trip: it tells you the identifier is not in the registry today, which is actionable for support workflows.

For a smoke test in your environment, try the sample NPI 1003000126 from the docs quickstart, then swap in real identifiers from your intake flow. Rate limits and monthly quotas are explicit in response headers and the dashboard so a burst of enrollments does not silently starve other services.