Methodology

Data sources

Every provider listing in MyBHLocator MN starts from public, authoritative records. We build the directory from three primary sources, then enrich it with provider self-reported and publicly available information:

1. National Provider Identifier (NPI) Registry — the CMS-maintained federal registry of every healthcare provider in the United States. We pull all MN-located providers in behavioral-health taxonomies (mental health, substance use, psychiatry, counseling, social work, marriage & family therapy).
2. Minnesota state license boards — the Board of Behavioral Health and Therapy (BBHT) and related licensing bodies for psychologists, social workers, and addiction counselors.
3. Minnesota Medicaid (MA) provider files — to flag which providers accept Medical Assistance and MinnesotaCare.

See Sources for the full list of feeds, links, and refresh dates.

AI-assisted data quality

MyBHLocator MN is built on a retrieval-augmented (RAG) data pipeline. We continuously ingest from authoritative sources — the NPPES NPI Registry, Minnesota state licensure boards, MN Medicaid provider files, and licensed clinic websites — and use large language models to extract, normalize, and cross-validate structured fields (services offered, accepted insurance, hours of operation, languages spoken). Every LLM-derived field is grounded in a retrieved source document; no provider information is generated without a citation back to a public record or self-reported page.

Layered on top of the LLM extraction is a set of deterministic heuristics: NPI-based entity resolution to deduplicate organizations across spelling variants, address normalization with suite-strip fallback, taxonomy-code filtering to keep the directory behavioral-health-only, and geospatial inference for county and ZIP rollups. Translations into Spanish, Somali, Hmong, and Vietnamese are produced through a machine-translation pipeline with deterministic terminology controls for clinical vocabulary. The result is a directory that scales to 36,000+ Minnesota providers while staying anchored to verifiable public data.

What "NPI Listed" means

When a provider page shows the NPI Listed badge, it means the provider’s National Provider Identifier appears in the federal NPPES registry maintained by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). NPI listing confirms the provider is registered with the federal system. It is not an endorsement of quality of care, a guarantee that the provider’s Minnesota state license is currently active, an indicator of insurance participation, or a guarantee of current availability or location.

Roughly 96% of our 35,000+ Minnesota provider listings have an NPI on file; the remainder are agencies, practice locations, or specialty-credentialed providers whose primary identifier is a state license. A separate, smaller subset of records have been cross-verified against state license boards — that deeper verification is something we’re actively expanding.

Update cadence

We refresh provider data on a rolling schedule:

• NPI registry — refreshed monthly. CMS publishes a full dataset weekly; we reconcile changes (new providers, address moves, license changes, deactivations) on a monthly cycle.
• State license status — refreshed quarterly, or sooner for individual providers when a verification request is submitted.
• Provider self-edits — applied within 1 business day of a verified claim or correction request.
• Removals — handled within 1 business day of receipt (deceased providers, retired licenses, opt-out requests). See our Editorial Policy for details.

Each provider page displays the data sources used to construct it. If you spot information that’s wrong or out of date, please let us know.

Geocoding and proximity

Provider addresses are geocoded once on intake and re-validated when the address changes. Proximity search uses the geocoded coordinate (not just ZIP centroid) so “therapists near me” results reflect actual driving distance, not postal-area approximation.

What we explicitly do not do

• We do not rank providers by paid placement. Our listings are ordered by relevance, geography, and verified data — never by sponsorship.
• We do not assess clinical quality. NPI registration confirms identity, not skill or outcomes. Patients should evaluate fit through direct consultation.
• We do not display fabricated reviews or ratings. If you see a rating on a page, it reflects publicly available structured data from a verified source, never a placeholder.

Crisis safety

Every provider page on MyBHLocator MN displays the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline banner. Crisis content is never gated behind paywalls, registration, or interstitial ads.