How we check doctors

FindMyDirectDoctor lists doctors and other clinicians who offer care you can pay for directly. That includes direct primary care and concierge medicine, where you pay the practice a monthly or yearly fee, and cash-pay visits, where you pay for each visit yourself. This page explains where the facts on a doctor's page come from and how we check them before we show them.

Where the facts come from

We start with our own listing, which our team has built and corrected by hand over several years. Then we look for public information about each doctor in these places:

• Official public records. These include the NPI registry, the federal list that gives each health care provider an ID number, Medicare's public files about doctors and clinics, Medicare's list of doctors who have chosen not to bill Medicare, and ClinicalTrials.gov, a government list of medical research studies.
• The doctor's own practice or hospital website. This is often the best place to learn about a doctor's training, services and fees.
• Other public information. This includes medical board and board certification lookups, published research, awards and news coverage about the doctor's work.
• Other public directories. We use these only to confirm a fact we already found somewhere else. We never copy their writing.

We do not use pages that need a login, paid data sellers or social media profiles that are closed to the public.

How a fact gets onto a page

Every fact is saved together with where we found it. A fact is shown only when one of these is true:

• It comes from our own listing or from an official public record.
• Two separate sources say the same thing.
• It comes from the doctor's own practice or hospital website.

If a fact disagrees with what we already know about the doctor, we do not show it until it has been reviewed. If we cannot be sure two pages are about the same person, we do not use the information at all.

What we never publish

• We do not publish negative news stories, lawsuits or complaints. Information about a doctor's license, including any action a medical board has taken against it, comes only from official medical boards.
• We never show a doctor's home address, family details or other private information.
• Our written summaries use the words doctor or physician only when the person's official record supports it. A physician assistant or nurse practitioner is described as exactly that.
• We show a fee only when it comes from the practice's own website, from the doctor, or from two separate sources that agree.

The written summary

The short summary near the top of a doctor's page is written with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), using only the facts we have checked. A second, separate check then compares every sentence with the saved sources. Any sentence we cannot back up with a source is removed. We record the date we last checked each fact.

Pages with very little information

Some doctors have very little public information about them. Their pages stay available to patients, but we ask search engines not to list them until we have at least two checked facts.

When something is wrong

Doctors can claim their free profile and correct it themselves. Changes to sensitive details, such as fees, licenses and the kind of practice, are checked by our team before they appear. Anyone can report a mistake. If a reported fact turns out to be wrong, or we cannot confirm it, we take it down.

This process is overseen by Harsha Moole, MD, an internal medicine physician and a co-founder of FindMyDirectDoctor.