Public Health & General Preventive Medicine Physician: how many are there, and how many are in private practice?

National totals

What this specialty covers

Public health and general preventive medicine focuses on promoting health, preventing disease, and managing the health of communities and defined populations. These practitioners combine population-based public health skills with knowledge of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention-oriented clinical practice in a wide variety of settings.

Reading the sole-proprietor share

For this specialty, 671 records, or 28.6%, carry the sole-proprietor flag, which can describe how often this classification is associated with that reported status. The flag is a self-reported NPPES field and an imperfect proxy for private practice, because it does not by itself establish ownership, employment arrangement, clinical setting, or independent 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.
• Reported NPPES fields, including taxonomy, can be incomplete or outdated.
• An active NPI record does not measure full-time status, workload, or patient volume.
• Sole-proprietor status is an imperfect proxy for private practice, and first-enumeration year is not necessarily a specialty-entry year.
• 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