Agency Information Collection Activities: Submission to OMB for Review and Approval; Public Comment Request; Applicant Organizational National Provider Identifiers and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Certification Numbers Form

Issuing agencies

Abstract

In compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, HRSA submitted an Information Collection Request (ICR) to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review and approval. Comments submitted during the first public review of this ICR will be provided to OMB. OMB will accept further comments from the public during the review and approval period. OMB may act on HRSA's ICR only after the 30-day comment period for this notice has closed.

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<title>Federal Register, Volume 91 Issue 195 (Friday, October 9, 2026)</title>
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[Federal Register Volume 91, Number 195 (Friday, October 9, 2026)]
[Notices]
[Pages 64663-64665]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [<a href="http://www.gpo.gov">www.gpo.gov</a>]
[FR Doc No: 2026-20731]


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DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES

Health Resources and Services Administration


Agency Information Collection Activities: Submission to OMB for 
Review and Approval; Public Comment Request; Applicant Organizational 
National Provider Identifiers and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid 
Services Certification Numbers Form

AGENCY: Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Department 
of Health and Human Services (HHS).

ACTION: Notice.

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SUMMARY: In compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, HRSA 
submitted an Information Collection Request (ICR) to the Office of 
Management and Budget (OMB) for review and approval. Comments submitted 
during the first public review of this ICR will be provided to OMB. OMB 
will accept further comments from the public during the review and 
approval period. OMB may act on HRSA's ICR only after the 30-day 
comment period for this notice has closed.

DATES: Comments on this ICR should be received no later than November 
9, 2026.

ADDRESSES: Written comments and recommendations for the proposed 
information collection should be sent within 30 days of publication of 
this notice to <a href="http://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAMain">www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAMain</a>. Find this particular 
information collection by selecting ``Currently under Review--Open for 
Public Comments'' or by using the search function.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: To request a copy of the clearance 
requests submitted to OMB for review, email Samantha Miller, the HRSA 
Information Collection Clearance Officer, at <a href="/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#6e1e0f1e0b1c19011c052e061c1d0f40090118"><span class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="d4a4b5a4b1a6a3bba6bf94bca6a7b5fab3bba2">[email&#160;protected]</span></a> or call 
(301) 443-9094.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: 
    Information Collection Request Title: Applicant Organizational 
National Provider Identifiers and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid 
Services Certification Numbers Form, OMB No. 0906-XXXX--New.
    Abstract: HRSA is proposing a new form to collect organizational 
National Provider Identifiers (Type 2 NPIs) and Centers for Medicare & 
Medicaid Services (CMS) Certification Numbers (CCNs) from organizations 
that apply for HRSA award funding through <a href="http://Grants.gov">Grants.gov</a>. The form will be 
completed as part of the <a href="http://Grants.gov">Grants.gov</a> funding application. This 
collection is limited to organizational identifiers and will only 
collect an NPI and/or CCN only from organizations that already have 
one. An organization is not required to have, or to obtain, an NPI or 
CCN in order to apply for or receive HRSA funding, and individual 
applicants (persons) are not asked to provide an individual (Type 1) 
NPI. Organizational NPIs are issued by the CMS through the National 
Plan and Provider Enumeration System. CCNs are issued by CMS to 
providers and suppliers that obtain Medicare or Medicaid certification.
    The purpose of this proposed collection is to strengthen the 
evidence HRSA uses to understand how it meets its mission of improving 
health outcomes through access to quality services, a skilled health 
workforce, and innovative, high-value programs. This collection is 
authorized under section 301 of the Public Health Service Act (42 
U.S.C. 241), which authorizes the Secretary of HHS to conduct and 
support research, investigations, experiments, demonstrations, and 
studies relating to the causes; diagnosis; treatment; control; and 
prevention of disease, and to collect and make available information on 
those activities, including the provision of technical assistance on 
statistical methods.

[[Page 64664]]

    HRSA collects this information to support research, program 
evaluation, and evidence-building consistent with its broader 
obligations to measure whether award recipients meet program objectives 
(e.g., 2 CFR 200.301(a)) and to ensure the data underlying HRSA's 
performance reporting are reliable and accurate (e.g., 31 U.S.C. 
1115(b)(7)-(8)), and consistent with the agency evidence-building plan 
obligations of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 
2018 (see 5 U.S.C. 312). These provisions inform why reliable provider 
identity data are useful to HRSA; the authority for this collection is 
42 U.S.C. 241. Further, collecting information will enhance 
accountability in HRSA funding and enable the agency to minimize fraud, 
waste, and abuse by ensuring that its funding of entities is non-
duplicative with funding provided by CMS.
    Linking HRSA program data to other datasets, and particularly to 
datasets at CMS, is currently difficult because HRSA lacks an 
identifier that reliably and consistently identifies funded 
organizations across its many programs and across externally available 
health-care delivery-system data. The Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) 
obtained from <a href="http://SAM.gov">SAM.gov</a> identifies the legal entity that receives an 
award, but it is not used in health-care transactions and does not 
appear in CMS claims, encounter, certification, or quality datasets. 
Organizational NPIs and CCNs address this gap because they are already 
embedded as standard provider-identity keys in widely used, publicly 
available CMS datasets. The organizational NPI is the standard unique 
identifier for organization health care providers used in HIPAA-
standard transactions and is therefore a stable, externally recognized 
organizational key; this descriptive fact about how NPIs are used is 
the reason HRSA considers the NPI a reliable identifier, and is not the 
legal authority for this collection. CCNs identify Medicare- and 
Medicaid-certified institutional providers and are the standard key for 
linking certified facilities to CMS institutional claims, certification 
files, cost reports, and facility-level quality data.
    A 60-day notice was published in the Federal Register on July 28, 
2026, vol. 91, No. 143; pp. 47253-47255. There were no public comments.
    Need and Proposed Use of the Information: All applicants for HRSA 
funding through <a href="http://Grants.gov">Grants.gov</a> must obtain a UEI from <a href="http://SAM.gov">SAM.gov</a> before 
beginning a funding application. Because UEI does not appear in CMS 
provider and claims data, collecting organizational NPIs and CCNs from 
organizations that already have them allows HRSA to link its program 
and award data to publicly available external datasets that use those 
identifiers. Such linkage supports more accurate, efficient, and 
credible agency analyses of program reach, utilization, cost, quality, 
and outcomes.
    For organizational applicants, the organizational NPI and CCN 
function as enterprise-level provider-identity keys that connect HRSA's 
internal funding, program, and service-site data to the external 
health-care delivery system. The organizational NPI connects funded 
organizations--including non-institutional providers such as health 
center organizations, clinics, group practices, laboratories, 
pharmacies, behavioral health organizations, and telehealth providers--
to Medicare professional and supplier claims, Medicare Advantage 
encounter data, Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System 
data, and National Plan and Provider Enumeration System organizational 
reference files. The CCN connects funded or supported certified 
facilities--such as hospitals, Critical Access Hospitals, Rural Health 
Clinics, Federally Qualified Health Centers, hospices, home health 
agencies, and end-stage renal disease facilities--to CMS institutional 
claims, the Provider of Services files, Healthcare Cost Report 
Information System cost reports, and CMS facility-level quality and 
outcomes data.
    Using these identifiers, HRSA can, for example: identify the full 
set of HRSA programs that support the same provider organization or 
facility, in order to understand portfolio-level funding concentration, 
overlap, and potential duplication; distinguish among the legal 
awardee, the service delivery site, the billing organization, and the 
certified facility, which are frequently different entities; validate 
that an organization or facility is represented in CMS certification 
and enumeration data; detect duplicate or fragmented records across 
programs using durable, externally verifiable anchors rather than name-
and-address matching alone; and build more credible evaluation datasets 
that compare funded organizations to appropriate comparison groups over 
time.
    This proposed collection differs from HRSA's current practice of 
collecting these data in two ways. First, it standardizes the 
collection of organizational (Type 2) NPIs and CCNs across HRSA-
supported programs rather than collecting them inconsistently program 
by program. Second, it does not collect individual (Type 1) NPIs. The 
collection is limited to organizations that already hold these 
identifiers; organizations without an NPI or CCN are not required to 
obtain one, and their eligibility for HRSA funding is unaffected by 
whether they provide an identifier.
    Data collected through this information collection will be used 
solely for research, evaluation, and analysis of program reach and 
effectiveness and for purposes of accountability and oversight--for 
example, identifying entities funded across HRSA and HHS, assessing 
program performance through internal and external data linkage, and 
supporting de-duplication, aggregation, and disaggregation of program 
data. Because this collection is limited to organizational identifiers, 
it does not collect individual NPIs or other personally identifiable 
information, and it is not designed to retrieve records about 
individuals. Data from this ICR will not be used to verify eligibility 
or compliance for cash or in-kind assistance under HRSA programs.
    HRSA recognizes that these identifiers have inherent limitations 
and intends to account for them analytically: an organizational NPI may 
represent a parent organization, subpart, or billing unit rather than a 
specific site; a CCN identifies a certified facility rather than its 
corporate owner or the HRSA awardee; NPI issuance does not validate 
licensure or credentialing; and claims and certification data do not 
capture all HRSA-funded activity (for example, enabling services, 
outreach, case management, workforce training, technical assistance, 
uninsured care, and public-health infrastructure). Accordingly, HRSA 
will treat external claims and certification data as complementary 
evidence and will maintain time-aware linkages that account for changes 
in NPI status, CCN status, ownership, and organizational structure.
    Likely Respondents: Organizations applying for HRSA funding through 
<a href="http://Grants.gov">Grants.gov</a> that already have an organizational NPI and/or a CCN.
    Burden Statement: Burden in this context means the time expended by 
persons to generate, maintain, retain, disclose, or provide the 
information requested. This includes the time needed to review 
instructions; to develop, acquire, install, and utilize technology and 
systems for the purpose of collecting, validating, and verifying 
information, processing and maintaining information, and disclosing and 
providing information; to train personnel and to be able to respond to 
a collection of information; to search data sources; to complete and 
review the collection of information; and to

[[Page 64665]]

transmit or otherwise disclose the information. The total annual burden 
hours estimated for this ICR are summarized in the table below.

                                     Total Estimated Annualized Burden Hours
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                                                                    Number of                 Average
                                                       Number of    responses      Total     burden per   Total
            Form name               Applicant type    respondents      per       responses    response    burden
                                                                    respondent               (in hours)   hours
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Applicant NPIs and CCNs Form....  No NPI or CCN.....        3,400            1       3,400         0.02    68.00
                                  One NPI and/or CCN        1,700            1       1,700         0.05    85.00
                                  Two or more NPIs          1,275            1       1,275         0.10   127.50
                                   and/or two or
                                   more CCNs.
                                                     -----------------------------------------------------------
    Total.......................  ..................        6,375  ...........       6,375  ...........   280.50
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Maria G. Button,
Director, Executive Secretariat.
[FR Doc. 2026-20731 Filed 10-8-26; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4165-15-P


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