I'm a brand new business analyst for a company that currently maintains its second-hand customer list (given by medical distributors, consisting mostly of hospitals, doctor's offices and smaller distributors) in Excel, by hand, line-at-a-time, 70+ thousand entries. If this wasn't enough of a headache, they're basically using Google to catch changes in things like parent company/child company information, medical specialties, mergers & acquisitions, name changes, etc, etc.
A large part of the problem is that these entities don't have a UID for easy tracking across changes. To that end, I've started trying to cobble together a webconnector to grab HIPAA NPI statistics, using the NPI as a UID and taking weekly updates from the HIPAA website for company updates. It's not perfect, but it's a start. I've spent a couple hours today looking at public API resources for company EINs via the SEC's EDGAR, but I don't seem to be getting very far.
Does anyone else have any ideas on open resources to keep a customer list updated via automation so I can go back to, y'know, analyzing stuff?