Editorial policy

1. Who we are and who we are not

RatedByPatients is an independent comparison and review site for United States telehealth platforms. We are not a healthcare provider, not a pharmacy, not an insurer and not affiliated with any company listed on this site. We do not treat patients, dispense medication, or give medical advice.

What we do is narrower and, we think, more useful: we track what these companies actually charge, what the public record says about them, and what patients report about using them - and we publish all three in a format you can compare.

2. Where our facts come from

Every factual statement on a provider page traces to one of four source types:

Marketing copy is not a source. A claim a company makes about itself is reported as a claim, attributed to the company, never restated by us as fact.

3. How prices are verified

Pricing is the single most gamed number in this industry, so it gets the strictest rule on the site: we never publish a price without a source we have opened and a date we checked it.

• Cash-pay and with-insurance prices are recorded as separate numbers, because for many providers they differ by a factor of two.
• We record the pricing model as well as the figure - a monthly subscription, a per-visit fee, a per-session rate and a product price are not comparable, and we label which one you are looking at.
• Where medication cost is bundled into a plan, we say so rather than showing a medication price of zero.
• Every published price carries the date it was last desk-checked. If a figure cannot be verified, the field stays empty and the page says nothing about it. Silence is the honest default.

4. How scores are produced

Every provider is scored on the same six dimensions, with the same published weights, by the same formula. The formula is applied by our systems - it is not typed in by an editor, and it cannot be edited for an individual company. Full detail, including the weights, is on the methodology page.

Two consequences follow, and we hold to both:

• A provider cannot negotiate a score, and no commercial relationship changes one. The number of scores that have ever been changed for commercial reasons is zero.
• Where the inputs are missing, we show a partial score or none at all rather than filling gaps with assumptions.

5. Patient reviews and moderation

Reviews are written by members of the public. We do not write them, edit their substance, or pay money for them, and providers cannot remove them. We do give a reader free Plus access for leaving a published review. Where we have, the review is labelled, and the reward is identical whether the review is glowing or scathing.

• Reviews are moderated before publication for personal information, abuse, obvious spam and content that identifies a named clinician.
• We remove reviews we can establish are fraudulent - including provider-submitted and competitor-submitted ones. We do not remove a review because it is negative.
• Reviews are opinion. They sit alongside our verified facts, clearly separated from them, and they never override the regulatory record.
• Patient ratings feed five of the six scoring dimensions. Trust is not one of them, because trust here is drawn from the public record rather than from sentiment.

6. Use of AI in drafting

We use automated drafting tools to assemble pages from data we have already verified. We are open about this because the alternative - implying a person hand-typed 155 provider pages - would be a lie.

The limits we place on it are what matter:

• Drafting tools work only from fields a human has verified and stored. They have no ability to browse for facts, and no ability to invent a price, a certification or a regulatory outcome.
• Scores are computed by the scoring formula, never written by a drafting tool.
• Trust statements - certification, warning letters, prescribing networks - render only from verified fields, and link to the primary document.
• A person is accountable for every published page and can be reached at the address below.

7. Medical accuracy and review

Pages that touch on treatments, medications or conditions are written to describe what is generally known, not to recommend a course of action. Where a page carries a named medical reviewer, that person has checked its clinical statements and their name and credentials appear on the page. Where no reviewer is named, none has reviewed it - we do not use a review badge as decoration.

Nothing here is a substitute for a consultation with a licensed clinician. See the medical disclaimer.

8. Advertising, affiliates and sponsorship

How we make money is set out in full in the affiliate disclosure. The editorial rules it creates are these:

• Paid placement is always labeled as paid, on the page where it appears.
• Paid relationships never affect a score, a ranking, or the content of a review. Rankings follow the formula.
• A company can pay for visibility on this site. It cannot pay for judgement, for a fact to be removed, or for a warning letter to go unmentioned.
• Where a company is given space to speak for itself, that space is boxed and attributed to the company, and is never presented as our assessment.

9. Claims we will never make

Some phrasing is common in this sector and is, on our reading, misleading. We do not use it:

• We do not describe our reviews as “verified” purchases or claim we have mystery-shopped a service we have not.
• We do not present a company’s absence from a regulatory database as proof of quality - only as what it is: no adverse record found on the date we checked.
• We do not publish savings, ratings, review counts or user numbers we cannot substantiate. Where we have no data, the page shows an empty state.
• We do not imply clinical endorsement of any provider or medication.

10. Updates, corrections and takedowns

Verification re-runs on a monthly cycle and scores recompute when tracked data changes. Each provider page shows when it was last checked.

When we are told about an error, a person checks it against the source. If we are wrong we fix it and the page’s updated date changes, so a correction is visible rather than silent. Material corrections to a factual claim are noted on the page itself.

Companies may request removal of information that is factually incorrect, and we will correct it on evidence. We do not remove accurate information, published regulatory records, or lawful negative reviews on request.

11. Raising an issue with us

Use the contact form and choose “Review correction” for a factual dispute, or “General support” for anything else. Tell us the page, the statement and what the correct position is - a link to the source makes it faster. We read everything sent to us, and corrections are prioritised over everything else in the queue.