How to verify a doctor’s NMC registration: IMR search, NMR and the new Unique ID

To verify a doctor’s registration in India, search the Indian Medical Register (IMR) on the National Medical Commission’s website. The register is a public document under section 31(4) of the NMC Act 2019, and the search returns the doctor’s name, qualification, registration number, year of registration and the State Medical Council that issued it.² It has two limits a hospital should know before relying on it: entries migrated from the old Medical Council of India database can be incomplete or missing, and there is no official API, so any automated lookup a vendor offers is a scrape of the same page.²

For a hospital outsourcing CT and MRI reads, this check is not optional. A remote report is valid because the reporting radiologist is registered with a State Medical Council or the NMC and the workflow is auditable⁶; the hospital that accepts the report should be able to show that it confirmed the registration, when, and against what.

The Indian Medical Register

The IMR consolidates the registers kept by each State Medical Council. Under section 31 of the NMC Act, the Commission maintains it as a national register of all licensed medical practitioners, and subsection (4) makes it a public document.²

Three gaps recur. First, older registrations were digitised from council records of uneven quality, so a genuinely registered doctor can be absent or mis-spelt.² Second, the IMR shows registration, not standing: it does not reliably reflect suspensions, and it does not show whether a state’s renewal requirement has been met. Third, a postgraduate radiology qualification may be missing from an entry that shows only the MBBS, so the degree certificate must be checked separately.

Step by step: searching the register

For a quick check, Raydiac’s NMC doctor registration check searches the register mirror the panel is verified against, by name or registration number, and states which councils it covers. For councils it does not cover yet, follow the official steps below.

1. Open the Indian Medical Register page on nmc.org.in.¹
2. Choose a search key. Registration number plus council is the most precise; name is the most forgiving but returns many matches for common names; year and council narrow a name search.
3. Enter the value exactly as it appears on the doctor’s council certificate. If a name search fails, try the surname alone, then initials without punctuation.
4. Compare every field of the result against the certificate: name, number, council and year. A match on number alone with a different council is not a match.
5. Save the result with the date. A screenshot or PDF print of the page, filed against the doctor’s credentialing record, is the evidence a hospital will need later.
6. If there is no result, do not conclude the doctor is unregistered. Ask for the council certificate and confirm with the State Medical Council directly.

The National Medical Register

The NMC opened registration on the National Medical Register (NMR) in August 2024 as a new, Aadhaar-linked register intended to give each doctor a single verified identity and, in time, to replace the IMR as the working reference.³ Uptake has been slow: about 1,800 doctors had completed NMR registration by December 2025, with roughly 30,000 applications pending.³ Until that changes, the IMR remains the register a hospital can actually search for most doctors.

What the NMR will add, once populated, is a verified link between the doctor, the Aadhaar identity, the degree and the council registration, plus a single identifier that does not depend on which state issued the licence. The draft regulations described below make NMR registration mandatory.

The draft Unique ID regulations

On 11 August 2026 the NMC notified the draft Registration of Medical Practitioners and Licence to Practice Medicine (Amendment) Regulations 2026. They propose a centrally generated Unique ID that would make a doctor eligible to practise medicine anywhere in India without fresh registration in each state, and would make NMR registration mandatory.⁴ Doctors’ bodies have raised implementation concerns, chiefly about the backlog of pending NMR applications and the transition from state-issued numbers.³

The regulations are a draft. Until they are finalised and brought into force, registration remains state-based, and a radiologist reporting for a hospital in another state operates in the grey zone the teleradiology regulations guide describes: the Telemedicine Practice Guidelines allow consultation across the nation but do not settle inter-state jurisdiction.⁷ The practical response is to verify the state registration, record the council and print it on every report.

The Healthcare Professionals Registry

The Healthcare Professionals Registry (HPR) is the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission’s directory of doctors and other professionals. A doctor enrols at nhpr.abdm.gov.in and receives a 14-digit Healthcare Professional ID (HPID) after the application is verified against council records, typically within three to five working days.⁵ An HPID confirms that a council record was found at the time of enrolment. It is a useful second signal for credentialing, and it is needed for ABDM participation, but it is not a medical registration and does not replace the IMR lookup or the council certificate. The ABDM guide covers the HPR alongside the facility registry and ABHA.

What a hospital should record when credentialing a radiologist

Raydiac does this for every radiologist on the network. Each radiologist holds an MD, DNB or DMRD in radiology and a State Medical Council or NMC registration, verified against the Indian Medical Register at onboarding and again every year; the degree, the council and the professional indemnity policy are recorded; and the radiologist is credentialed separately for each hospital and each modality, so the assignment engine offers a study only to radiologists holding an active credential for that organisation and modality. Every signed report carries the radiologist’s name, qualification, registration number and council, and a hospital can see the credential record for any radiologist who reads its studies. The hospital page describes the credentialing step in the onboarding flow.

What a radiologist should keep ready

A radiologist joining a hospital panel or a teleradiology network can save weeks by having a credentialing pack ready. The teleradiology jobs guide describes the rest of the onboarding; the documents are these.

• State Medical Council registration certificate, with the number and council name legible.
• A saved copy of your own IMR entry, so you can point a hospital to the exact search that finds you, and know in advance if the entry is missing or wrong.
• NMR registration confirmation or acknowledgement, and your HPID if enrolled.
• MD, DNB or DMRD certificate and the MBBS degree.
• Professional indemnity policy schedule with number, cover and expiry.
• PAN and bank details for TDS and payout, and a signature method you control: Aadhaar eSign or a DSC, never a scanned image.

Figures on NMR uptake are as reported in August 2026 and will change. The Unique ID regulations were a draft at the time of writing; check nmc.org.in for the final text.