Licensure follows the patient, not the provider

The problem is multiplication, not verification

A single physician on a national panel may hold licences in six states. Verifying them once at onboarding tells you very little: what matters is whether this clinician is currently licensed in that patient's state, today. A panel of 200 clinicians across 10 states is not 200 verifications, it is closer to 1,200 — and each licence lapses on its own schedule.

Because state is a parameter rather than a property of the provider, the same person is checked independently per state:

# Same clinician, two states, two independent licences
POST /v1/verify  {"first_name":"Jane","last_name":"Provider","state":"PA","npi":"1234567890"}
POST /v1/verify  {"first_name":"Jane","last_name":"Provider","state":"OH","npi":"1234567890"}

# PA may return an active licence while OH returns expired. Both are true.

Out-of-state telehealth registrations

Several states have created licence categories specifically for clinicians treating their residents from elsewhere. Florida is the clearest example: its MQA file carries dedicated out-of-state telehealth registration types alongside conventional licences, and they appear as their own licence type in a result. If your model is cross-state by design, those categories are often the ones that actually authorise the encounter.

New York matters for a different reason. A New York licence does not expire — the triennial registration does — so the meaningful question is whether the clinician is currently registered, which is what we return.

Catch a lapse before the next appointment

A licence valid at onboarding can lapse mid-engagement, and nothing in your system will notice unless something is watching. Monitoring re-checks a provider on a schedule and posts a signed webhook when the status changes, an expiry approaches, a disciplinary flag appears, or an exclusion is added.

Coverage that matches a behavioural-health panel

Telehealth panels skew towards behavioural health, which is where state coverage usually thins out. Psychologists, LCSWs, LPC/LMHCs and LMFTs are all four verifiable in 20 states today, physicians in 26, and registered nurses in 9. The role matrix shows which state covers which licence, and uncovered states return an explicit unsupported_state rather than a guess — so you know precisely where human review is still required.