The Doctors and Clinicians national downloadable file plus the MIPS Performance file, both on data.cms.gov. The first carries name, specialty, address, group practice IDs; the second carries final MIPS score and the four category point totals. SleekRank joins them on the ten-digit NPI per clinician.

CMS publishes final MIPS scores annually, normally in early summer for the prior performance year. Provider directory fields refresh more frequently. Setting cache_duration to 86400 seconds gives daily re-fetch on the directory side; the MIPS performance file updates yearly regardless of how often you re-fetch.

{npi}-{name-slug}-{specialty-slug} reads well in SERP and stays unique even when two clinicians share a name. NPI is the stable backbone; the name plus specialty makes the URL meaningful to a human searcher. Drop the specialty if the name plus NPI is already unique in your render.

Yes, but rendering the four category points alongside gives the page real depth and helps with both ranking and reader trust. Quality, Cost, Improvement Activities, and Promoting Interoperability each tell a different story; collapsing them into one number throws away the most useful context the data carries.

Clinicians below the low-volume threshold or in alternative payment models may not have a MIPS score in the performance file. Use a Twig conditional to suppress the score badge for those NPIs and render a participation-status tag instead. The directory page still publishes; only the score block is omitted from the layout.

When an NPI is deactivated in the CMS file, the SleekRank row disappears on the next refresh and the URL returns 404. The sitemap regenerates without it. To preserve any earned search equity, add a redirect rule pointing the deactivated NPI to the group practice page before the row drops from the dataset.

Yes. Map first name, last name, credential suffix, specialty, address, and accepted-assignment status into a Physician JSON-LD block. Use AggregateRating only when MIPS final score is present; otherwise emit the Physician block without the rating to avoid schema validation errors that Search Console flags.

SleekRank stores each resolved record as a row in wp_sleek_rank_items, roughly 2-4 KB per clinician depending on which fields you map. A full million NPIs translates to a 3-5 GB table, manageable on a standard managed-MySQL plan. Most teams start with one specialty subset and scale up.