Preferred Provider Organization: how many are there, and how many are in private practice?

National totals

What this specialty covers

A group of physicians and/or hospitals who contract with an employer to provide services to their employees. In a PPO, the patient may got to the physician of his/her choice, even if that physician does not participate in the PPO, but the patient receives care at a lower benefit level.

Reading the sole-proprietor share

For this specialty, the sole-proprietor share is an administrative indicator, not a direct count of clinicians or organizations operating in private practice: 160 records (5.1%) are flagged in NPPES. The field is self-reported and may not capture the PPO's ownership, contracting structure, or the practice arrangements of participating clinicians, so it is an imperfect proxy for private practice.

By state

New NPI registrations by year

Counts reflect the year each NPI was first issued, among records still active today. The final year is partial: this data covers through 2026-01-11.

Data notes

• The sole-proprietor field is self-reported by the provider in NPPES and is an imperfect proxy for private practice.
• A sole-proprietor count shown as <11 is suppressed: the true value is below 11, which could include zero.
• The count is limited to active NPI records with PPO as the primary taxonomy, so it is not a census of PPO contracts or provider locations.
• An NPI's first-enumeration year is not necessarily the year the PPO began operations or a contract began.
• Providers are counted once, by their primary taxonomy code only.

Source: CMS National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) Data Dissemination file, FOIA-disclosable public data under CMS-6060-N. Aggregated by Hero EMR on 2026-08-03; deactivated NPIs excluded; specialty assigned from the primary taxonomy code (NUCC 25.1). Counts below 11 are suppressed. Individual providers are never published. All provider data pages.

Common questions