What the evidence can establish
DoctorOwned combines public observations, but it does not turn missing data into proof. Every public status is designed to show both the conclusion and its limitation.
NPPES is an identifier source, not an ownership registry
The National Plan and Provider Enumeration System supplies public organization and provider records used in health care administrative transactions. CMS describes the NPI as an intelligence-free identifier and warns that issuance does not validate licensure or credentials. An authorized official may be an executive, partner, or qualifying direct owner. That person is not necessarily the treating dentist or controlling owner.
Source: CMS NPPES downloadable files and limitations and CMS Form 10114.
Evidence layers
- NPPES organization records: legal names, practice locations, public contact fields, provider relationships, and authorized-official observations.
- Published DSO locations: affirmative matches to offices that a DSO or network publicly identifies as its location.
- Public organization relationships: parent, entity, contact, and infrastructure patterns that may support or contradict a classification.
- Manual documentation review: ownership evidence submitted for review, assessed separately from listing promotion or factual corrections.
Internal relationship candidates are research leads. A public DSO statement requires a record-specific citation; shared contacts, addresses, names, or infrastructure do not clear that gate by themselves.
Public ownership statuses
A documented manual review supports the conclusion. The review method and date appear on the record.
The automated screen did not find a known DSO match. This negative finding is not proof of dentist ownership.
Available sources are incomplete, stale, conflicting, or do not support a responsible conclusion.
An automated signal exists, but it is not published as an affiliation until a reviewed public citation supports it.
A reviewed public source directly supports the organization-to-network relationship.
The record appears to represent a school, FQHC, hospital, government clinic, or similar organization rather than a private office.
What DoctorOwned does not claim
- A standard automated result does not certify dentist ownership.
- A missing result does not prove that no independent office exists.
- A dentist record does not establish ownership of the associated office.
- A ZIP-center distance is not an exact office distance.
- Public contact fields may be stale, incomplete, or use a billing entity rather than a patient-facing brand.
Transparency without publishing detection fingerprints
Practice pages show observed facts, source category, review date, classification version, and the public conclusion. Internal scoring weights, thresholds, and abuse-sensitive fingerprints remain private so records cannot be engineered to pass the screen.
Corrections and review
Anyone may report a factual error free of charge. A practice may also claim its identity and contact data for free. Ownership verification is a separate documented review. Payment never changes a classification, and sponsored placement cannot replace organic relevance.
Accuracy reporting
DoctorOwned will publish tier-specific accuracy only after a stratified sample has been independently labeled and disagreements have been adjudicated. Until then, no site-wide precision or recall claim should be inferred from record counts.