01 · The NPDB, precisely

The National Practitioner Data Bank, explained.

The National Practitioner Data Bank, the NPDB, is a confidential clearinghouse Congress created: not a public database, not a credential, and not a clearance. What follows is precise and dated: what it holds, who may query it, what a query costs today, what changes on 4 December 2026, and exactly what a clean response does, and does not, prove.

Facts dated 13 Aug 2026 · Doc RVN-EXP-NPDB

Registered access only. Two public exceptions.

The NPDB holds specific report types only: medical malpractice payments and certain adverse licensure, clinical privilege, and professional society actions, nothing broader than that. Access to what it holds is set by federal rule, not by Rōvn and not by any vendor sitting between a hospital and the source.

Who may query: Registered, eligible entities only: hospitals, health plans, state licensing boards, and a defined list of other healthcare organizations. Each entity receives only the categories of information its own registration category is lawfully permitted to see¹.
The two public exceptions: A practitioner may run a Self-Query against their own file, for a fee. A plaintiff's attorney may query, only under narrow conditions: an active malpractice case naming a hospital alleged not to have queried the NPDB as required, and only for use in that case.
The mandatory query: A hospital must query the NPDB when a practitioner first requests clinical privileges, and again at least once every two years for as long as that practitioner holds them.

02 · The query and fee ledger

Three fees, printed, not quoted.

Every NPDB query carries a fee HRSA publishes itself, separate from anything a vendor charges around it. Below is the ledger exactly as HRSA sets it, current as of the date on this page.

One-Time Query: $2.50; per query, per practitioner
Continuous Query: $2.50; per one-year enrollment
Self-Query: $3.00; plus $13.00 for each mailed copy of the report

The NPDB receives no federal appropriations. Every fee above funds its own operation and nothing else, which is why the amounts are published rather than negotiated¹.

Agent watchA query runs under the querying organization's own authorization and eligibility, never Rōvn's. Its result enters a clinician's record as a sourced, receipted fact, and no response implies a permission or a clearance beyond the exact context that granted it.

1 HRSA, National Practitioner Data Bank (npdb.hrsa.gov), accessed 13 Aug 2026: query eligibility, the published fee schedule, the scheduled query merger, and NPDB's own guidance on how a response should be used. Not Rōvn results; Rōvn does not operate or control the NPDB.

03 · Dated change

One query, not two, from 4 December 2026.

A structural change to the ledger above is already scheduled, and dated, not speculative.

Document notice · effective 4 Dec 2026

The One-Time Query and the Continuous Query merge into a single NPDB Query. Existing enrollments transfer automatically: nothing lapses, and no organization needs to re-enroll to keep monitoring active.

The fee ledger above will update again once HRSA publishes the merged product's price. Until then, the two current lines still apply exactly as printed.

04 · The limit

A clean response is not a clearance.

The NPDB says plainly that its information belongs alongside other credentialing sources, never as the sole source of a credentialing decision.

A clean response confirms one narrow thing: no reportable action is currently on file for that practitioner, in that query. It says nothing about whether a license is current, a degree is real, a board certification stands, or an exclusion sits in a separate federal or state list entirely. Reading a clean NPDB response as a full clearance is the single most common misunderstanding this page exists to correct.

05 · One query among many

One query, inside the whole packet.

A complete credentialing file runs several checks side by side. The NPDB is one of six here, not the whole of them, and it does not outrank the other five.

Licensure
State license, current and unrestricted, confirmed with the issuing board.
Education and training
Degree and training years, confirmed with the issuing school.
Board certification
Specialty certification, confirmed with the certifying board.
NPDB queryholds this position
Malpractice payments and specific adverse actions on file, federal, this page’s subject.
Sanctions and exclusions
OIG and state exclusion lists, checked separately from the NPDB.
Malpractice history
Claims history, gathered from the practitioner and, where available, insurers.

The NPDB holds the fourth position above: real, dated, and no larger than the rows around it. One query, among many, was always the honest description.

Read what the rest of the packet requires