Methodology

How we evaluate telehealth providers

Provider reviews start with a sign-up. A member of the editorial team creates a real account using their own identity (no test personas, no synthetic data), completes the intake honestly, and documents every screen with timestamped notes. We don’t accept gifted access, we don’t see screeners in advance, and we don’t share drafts with the provider before publishing.

Each provider is scored on a published rubric across six dimensions:

• Clinical model. What licensure is required of the prescribing clinician? Sync video, async, or messaging only? Is there a real prescriber on the other side of the screen, or a template they sign off?
• Cost transparency.Is the full price visible before the intake? Is the price for the drug itself separated from the membership? What changes at the dose increase that the intake doesn’t warn you about?
• Insurance and prior authorisation support. Does the provider help submit a prior auth, or refuse insurance entirely? Do they steer you toward cash-pay compounded versions when insurance is available?
• Side-effect support. What is the published protocol for nausea, GI events, and dose adjustment? Is there a named clinician you can message, or only chatbot triage?
• Off-ramp policy.The category’s tell. Does the provider have a documented tapering protocol, a nutrition handoff, or any post-discontinuation pathway? Or do they expect you to refill forever?
• Cancellation friction. Time-to-cancel, dark patterns, retention discounts that retroactively change pricing.

Each dimension is scored 1–5 against a public scoring guide (one click from any review). The final score is an unweighted average. We do not bury the rubric; the scoring guide and the live screenshots from our sign-up live on the review page. If the rubric changes, prior scores are recomputed and a changelog entry is added.

How we cite sources

Every efficacy claim — “reduces body weight by X% over Y weeks”, “side-effect incidence Z%”, “discontinuation rate at twelve months” — is tied to a primary source. The hierarchy:

1. Peer-reviewed clinical trial(linked to PubMed or the publishing journal’s permanent record). Trial name, sample size, follow-up period, and the relevant endpoint are stated in the sentence the citation supports.
2. Regulatory document (FDA label, advisory committee briefing, EMA assessment report). Linked to the .gov or .europa.eu primary host, not a press release.
3. Manufacturer prescribing information(the FDA-approved label, accessed via the manufacturer’s document library or DailyMed).
4. Provider pricing and protocol pages — dated and screenshotted at access. Telehealth provider pages change weekly; we cite the URL plus the access date and archive the page.

Secondary sources (news articles, blog posts, podcasts) are linked for narrative context but do not carry an efficacy claim by themselves. If a number appears in a news article and we cannot locate the underlying trial or filing, we don’t print the number.

How we apply medical review

Articles fall into one of three review states, labelled at the top of the page and surfaced in the page’s structured data:

• Medically reviewed. A US-licensed physician, board-certified in obesity medicine (ABOM), has read the article and signed off on its clinical accuracy as of the published review date. The reviewer is named, credentialed, and linked to a verifiable profile. The review date is shown — not just the publication date.
• Awaiting medical review.The article contains substantive clinical content (dosing, mechanism, contraindications, adverse-event guidance) that has not yet been reviewed. We say so, in a coloured banner at the top, and we link this page so you can see what “awaiting review” means. We do not backdate review labels.
• Editorial content.The article reports public information — a regulatory notice, a provider’s pricing page, a cost calculation, an FDA filing summary — and is not clinical advice. These pages do not require medical review and are labelled accordingly. We are conservative about which articles qualify; if in doubt, we route through review.

The firewall: affiliate relationships and editorial

Some providers we cover pay us an affiliate commission when a reader signs up via our link. Others do not. The scoring rubric is blind to this. A high-commission provider can still rank low; a no-commission provider can still top a comparison. The editorial team does not see commission tiers when scoring. The commission relationship is disclosed inline at the link itself, not in a footer disclaimer. See our editorial policy for the full firewall protocol and the corrections we have issued under it.

Update cadence

Every page carries a published date and a last updated date. Provider review pages are refreshed quarterly at minimum, and immediately on any of: pricing change, formulation change, regulatory action (FDA warning letter, state Attorney General action), or a substantive policy update by the provider. Clinical drug pages are refreshed annually and immediately on FDA label changes, new pivotal trial publication, or shifts in safety signalling. Regulatory tracker pages are refreshed within seventy-two hours of a relevant filing. If a refresh changes a substantive claim, the change is logged at the bottom of the page with the date and the reason.

Corrections

When we are wrong, we correct the article in place, append a dated correction note at the foot of the page, and — if the error materially changed a recommendation — push a notification to the email list. Corrections are public, named, and never silently rewritten. The running corrections log lives on the editorial policy page.