Surname atlas
The most common surname in American medicine is Smith, carried by 47,832 providers.
The fifteen most common surnames on the registry
Psychiatry Physician: Patel (282), Smith (241), Lee (227).
Cardiovascular Disease Physician: Patel (250), Shah (143), Lee (115).
Dermatology Physician: Lee (88), Smith (81), Patel (64).
Pediatrics Physician: Patel (341), Smith (305), Lee (299).
Family Medicine Physician: Smith (866), Patel (768), Johnson (668).
Surname distribution is a blunt instrument, but it is one of the few signals in the registry that tracks migration and training pipelines at all. It says nothing about any individual and should not be read as though it does.
How this was built
Surnames are taken verbatim from the legal name field, which is inconsistently formatted: hyphenated and compound names are sometimes split and sometimes not, so counts for those are undercounts.
This is a count of names, not of people's origins, and no inference about anyone's background follows from it.
Rebuilt 2026-09-15 from the CMS National Plan and Provider Enumeration System · more experiments