# About credential-wa — scope, sources and what we left out

> How this site is built: which rows are loaded, which fields are deliberately not republished, and what the numbers mean.

## How this site is built

An independent search layer over one public file. Not affiliated with the Department of Health or the State of Washington.

### Scope: active credentials only

The Department’s file holds 2,445,631 rows. This site loads
the **553,932** marked *Active* and nothing else:
1,506,984 expired rows, plus closed, superseded and suspended ones, answer
a different question and are left out. If a credential is not here, that means
it is not currently active — not that it never existed.

A small oddity worth naming rather than hiding: a handful of rows are
marked active with an expiry date already in the past. We publish them as the
Department publishes them, and do not silently correct the file.

### ⚠️ What we deliberately do not republish

The source file carries a **year of birth** for
552,133 of these people, next to their full name. We do not download it,
do not store it, do not index it and do not display it — not on a page,
and not on the record you get when you search.

The reason is not that the Department was wrong to publish it. It is that
full name plus year of birth is an identification pair used for identity
theft, and it does nothing at all to answer the question this site exists to
answer. A field that adds risk and no answer does not belong here.

There is an irony in that, and we would rather say it than have it noticed:
Washington renews credentials *on the holder’s birthday*. This
site is entirely about renewal dates and it does not know when anyone was
born. You can say when a credential expires without saying when someone was
born, and that is exactly what these pages do.

### The disciplinary flag

1,462 active credentials carry one, 1,947 a pending one. Pages
carry counts; a name never carries a flag.
[The full reasoning](/discipline.md).

### How the pages are chosen

A credential type gets a page when at least 150 active credentials
carry it — 98 of 169 types qualify,
covering 99.6% of the register. A
narrower page, by expiry year or by first-issue year, needs
150. Below that a page names a handful of people and describes
nothing, which is a page about those people rather than about the
profession.

There is no geographical page on this site, and that is not an oversight:
the Department’s file carries **no city, no county and no postcode
at all**. We looked for a way to add one — matching these names
against the federal NPI registry, which does carry practice addresses —
and measured it before building anything: 3 clean matches out of 8. On a file
that names clinicians, a name-based match would give two thirds of them no
location and hand some of them a namesake’s address. So there is no map
here, and no « nurses near you ».

### Source and freshness

One file: Health Care Provider
Credential Data , published by the Washington State Department of Health on data.wa.gov, public domain,
first posted 2016-01-20. The Department extracts it from its live database at
2:00 a.m. and republishes it at 10:00 a.m. daily. Our copy is from
**2026-08-20** and about 6,583 credentials
are added to it every month, so it drifts.

For the position *today*, and for anything certified, use
 the Department’s own
search .

The absence of information in the Provider Credential Search system doesn’t imply any recommendation, endorsement or guarantee of competence of any healthcare professional. The presence of information in this system doesn’t imply a provider isn’t competent or qualified to practice.

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Página: https://credential-wa.pages.dev/about/
Fonte: Health Care Provider Credential Data — Washington State Department of Health
Recolha: 2026-08-20