DoctorVerify — an MCP server for verifying Indian doctors

Verifies that someone claiming to be a registered Indian doctor actually is one, using live data from the National Medical Commission — while staying honest about exactly what's official, what's undocumented, and what's a manual fallback. Read "How verification actually works here" before you use it; it's the most important part of this README.

What's here

Related MCP server: Eka MCP Server

How verification actually works here

The official registry doesn't publish an API for third parties — but it doesn't need to, for this to work. The authoritative source is the National Medical Commission's Indian Medical Register (IMR), searchable by the public at nmc.org.in. Its own search page calls a public, unauthenticated JSON endpoint (nmc.org.in/MCIRest/open/...) directly from client-side JavaScript to render results — found by reading that page's own script, not by guessing. search_doctor_registration, get_doctor_profile, and check_blacklist call that same endpoint, so they return real IMR data: registration, qualification, university, and current suspension status.

An earlier version of this README claimed nmc.org.in's robots.txt disallows automated access. That was checked and turned out to be wrong: the file at that path isn't a standards-format robots.txt at all — it's a misconfigured Apache snippet blocking a short list of named SEO crawlers (Ahrefs, Majestic, Semrush, ...) by User-Agent, with no general Disallow directive. The Terms of Use don't prohibit this either. That's what changed to make live verification here reasonable, where it wasn't before.

The honest caveat: this endpoint is still undocumented and unsupported by NMC. It could change shape, get rate-limited, or disappear without notice — there's no SLA, versioning, or support contract behind it. Treat it as read-only, single-lookup traffic, not a bulk pipeline (these tools cap result counts and never auto-paginate, on purpose). registration_lookup_guide stays in the toolset specifically as the fallback for when the live path breaks or a result looks wrong.

A real trap worth knowing about: while researching this, nmcn.org.in — one letter off from the real nmc.org.in — turned up ranking for "verify Indian doctor" searches, displaying IMR-style search content despite not being run by the National Medical Commission. flag_lookalike_domain catches that one by name and flags anything else unfamiliar as unreviewed rather than assuming it's safe. Always prefer typing nmc.org.in yourself over clicking a link from a hospital, agent, or ad — and remember a live-looking result can still come from a fake site.

If you need automated verification at scale — say, onboarding many doctors into a health-tech platform rather than checking one by hand — there are two more paths, both officially sanctioned (unlike the endpoint above), and both heavier than a weekend project:

1. Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), Healthcare Professional Registry (HPR). The government's own digital-identity system for doctors, with a real, documented OAuth2 API and a sandbox at sandbox.abdm.gov.in. It's built for registering and confirming practitioners as part of an accredited health system integration (the M1 module), not anonymous one-off lookups, so onboarding is a genuine integration project — client ID/secret, certification, the works.

2. Commercial KYC/verification vendors (e.g. Surepass, IDfy). Several companies resell NMC-backed doctor verification as a paid, supported API product. That can be the pragmatic choice for production use, but evaluate each vendor's actual data source, freshness, and terms yourself — this project doesn't endorse a specific one.

Setup

Requires Python 3.10+ and uv.

./setup.sh

This is a proper installable package (src/doctor_verify_mcp/, pyproject.toml), not just a loose script. ./setup.sh runs uv sync, which creates .venv (pinned to Python 3.10 via .python-version) and installs the package plus its dev dependency group (pytest) in editable mode. Without uv, fall back to python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate && pip install -e '.[dev]' (add a [dependency-groups]-to-[project.optional-dependencies] mirror if your pip version doesn't understand dependency groups yet).

Run it

uv run mcp dev src/doctor_verify_mcp/server.py

Open the Inspector URL it prints. Try search_doctor_registration with just a name, then narrow it with a registration number or state_council. Take a doctor_id from the results and pass it to get_doctor_profile. Try check_blacklist with no arguments to see the full current list. Try flag_lookalike_domain with nmcn.org.in and with nmc.org.in and compare. Check the doctor-verification://official-sources resource for the full picture in one place.

Once installed (editable or from a built wheel), the package also exposes a console script that runs the server directly over stdio (no Inspector, for wiring into a real host): uv run doctor-verify-mcp.

Build it

uv build

Produces dist/doctor_verify_mcp-<version>-py3-none-any.whl and a matching .tar.gz sdist, installable anywhere with pip install dist/doctor_verify_mcp-*.whl.

Test it

uv run pytest

The tests for the three live tools mock the HTTP layer (doctor_verify_mcp.server._http_client) with NMC's real response shapes captured during development, so the suite doesn't hit nmc.org.in on every run.

Connect it to a real host

Building an actual integration (e.g. wiring this into a doctor registration/onboarding flow)? See INTEGRATION.md for the full tool reference, a recommended verification flow, the error-handling contract, and known quirks of the live endpoint.

Same pattern as any local MCP server — a host runs your server as a child process over stdio, so every host needs the same launch command with an absolute path. Once the package is installed, the doctor-verify-mcp console script is the cleanest launch target instead of pointing hosts at server.py directly.

Claude Desktop: uv run mcp install src/doctor_verify_mcp/server.py, then fully quit and reopen the app.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add doctorverify -- uv run --with "mcp[cli]" mcp run /absolute/path/to/src/doctor_verify_mcp/server.py

Cursor (.cursor/mcp.json) and VS Code (.vscode/mcp.json) follow the same command/args shape — see the previous project's README for the exact JSON if you need a reminder.

Extending this

• Add a tool that validates a registration number's shape once you know the format your state council actually uses — they vary enough across states that this project doesn't guess at one.

• Add more entries to KNOWN_LOOKALIKES as you encounter them.

• If the MCIRest endpoint ever changes shape or starts blocking automated traffic, the live tools already raise a clear error pointing back to registration_lookup_guide rather than failing silently — check there first before assuming a doctor doesn't exist.

• If you go the ABDM/HPR route, a verify_hpr_id tool that calls the real, documented API (with your own client credentials, never hardcoded in source) would give you a supported alternative to the undocumented endpoint this project uses today.

• Add a resource per State Medical Council with direct links, for the cases where the IMR doesn't show a result and the fallback is checking a specific state's council site directly.