DEA Lookup.com
Spearheading Healthcare through Software Innovation

Originally formed in 1973, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has played an integral role in regulating the healthcare industry. This role centers around the Controlled Substances Act Database, which regulates at some level almost all aspects of the healthcare industry. Then comes November 2020 and the DEA instituted the most signification change to their database in decades. With little advance notice they limited access to their database to currently active registrants and approved healthcare entities, while also instituting strict data usage rules on the data limiting how the data can be used and shared within the industry.

Few companies were more affected by these changes than DEA Lookup.com, which at the time was primarily an online based search service of the DEA database. Founded in 2005 by Greg Merritt, DEA Lookup had a great deal of experience in working with the DEA database – building applications, custom datasets and projects, merging the data with other databases, and of course manual search. Under the new data rules, DEA Lookup would no longer be able to offer the web-based search service which had been at the core of their offerings for over 15 years. This was a mortal threat to the company. Their main competitor at the time - deanumber. com – decided that under the new rules they would simply shut down. Since they primarily resold the raw DEA datasets, they decided there was no future for their business. For DEA Lookup.com, things too looked bleak.

After considerable soul searching, DEA Lookup realized however that their service and customer base was quite different. Approximately 95% of DEA Lookup’s customers were registrants and healthcare organizations. These customers were going to need a flexible search tool to find DEA numbers for validation and credentialing under this new paradigm, just as they had done online before. And as registrants they could possess and work with the data, but they didn’t have the tools for working with the raw datasets they were going to need. Taking a chance, DEA Lookup made a hard pivot and dove into a significant software development effort to find workable solutions for their customers.

Within weeks of the new data rules, DEA Lookup had beta versions of the new DEA License Lookup software being tested by customers. And within 6 weeks, version 1 of the software was released to all existing DEA Lookup customers. Fast forward to the present, DEA License Lookup has all of the manual search features and capabilities of the old website – with several significant additions. Most notably, is the List Validator service option which allows customers to validate up to 1000 DEA numbers almost instantly.

The unique combination of our automation software and manual search tool is what distinguishes DEA Lookup.com from its competitors

In addition, customers can set the software to automatically download the PDF primary source proof of registration from the DEA data servers – a tremendous time saver for customers needing primary source proof for credentialing under the various evolving regulatory requirements.

Other products from DEA Lookup include the DEA NPI Data Engine software which allows the automation of downloading the DEA and NPI datasets, as well as the automation of a customized cross reference output file. This solution is perfect for customer enterprise application development and software solutions. Another is the DEA API Data Engine, also allowing enterprise-wide development flexibility. “The unique combination of our automation software and manual search tool is what distinguishes DEA Lookup. com from its competitors,” remarks Gregory Merritt, President, DEA Lookup.com. The team at DEA Lookup utilizes their technical and industry experience to offer flexible and powerful solutions for the Pharmaceutical industry– from custom application development, internal order processing systems, the building of custom healthcare datasets, and much more.

As a foundational principle, DEA Lookup software stores the DEA data in a segregated container using military-grade encryption. Built with a compliance mindset, the company’s solutions securely log customer activity in anticipation of future audit risk from the various state and federal agencies. The software is designed to protect companies at multiple levels, including employee errors in handling sensitive data. Besides using out-of-the-box solutions, DEA Lookup also builds customized tools that enable customers work with databoth securely and compliantly.

“We listen to our customers and bring to them the solutions they ask for,” remarks the President. Be it providing a cross-reference file between DEA and the NPI for importing resources into an application development or giving tools to conduct manual searching of data, the company does it all.

Innovation forms the core of the Delaware based firm. Being the one-stop shop for healthcare clients - from retail pharmacies, PBMs, manufacturers, distributors to insurance companies- for all these years, it now looks forward to continuing to innovate. In short, the company is striving hard to make data available at the fingertips of its customers.