A practical scale to place your own database against, built from real, documented numbers, not a vendor's marketing page.
Here's a straightforward scale for where a physician database typically sits, based on the fullest definition of mailability: address, affiliation, active NPI status, and identity, all current at once.
| Mailability rate | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Below 50% | Undiagnosed. This is where one real, audited physician database started, despite being actively maintained by a reputable provider on a regular schedule. If you've never independently checked, don't assume you're above this. |
| 50-89% | The unmeasured middle. Some process exists, but coverage is inconsistent, and the real number varies enormously from one company to the next. Most databases that "seem fine" live somewhere in this range, untested. |
| 90-94% | Actively enriched. Achievable through a focused enrichment effort. This is a real, documented result, not a theoretical ceiling. |
| 95%+ | Continuously validated. Requires ongoing monitoring rather than a single cleanup, since decay resumes the moment checking stops. |
Where these numbers actually come from
The bottom and top of that scale aren't estimates. They're a single, documented before-and-after: a physician database that looked properly maintained tested at 47.4% mailable on the fuller standard, reached over 90% after targeted enrichment, and sustained over 95% with continuous validation afterward.
Read the Full Case Study →That's different from the vague 92%, 95%, and 99.95% figures on most data vendors' websites, which usually come with no baseline shown and no way to check them. A number with a documented starting point tells you something. A number with none is just a claim.
Finding your own tier
The fastest way to find out where you actually sit: pull a random sample of 50 to 100 records, and check each one against three things directly, current address, active NPI status, and current affiliation, not just whether the record looks complete on the surface. Whatever percentage passes all three is a rough estimate of your real tier. For most teams who've never done this before, it lands lower than expected, often in that unmeasured 50-89% band above.
The real point of a benchmark
A scale like this is only useful once you actually know which tier you're in, and most teams don't, because almost nobody runs the check above until something else forces the question. That gap, more than any specific percentage, is the thing worth closing first.
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