How we vet 500+ specialists.
73% of applicants do not make the network. Here is exactly what we check, why we check it, and what we are willing to walk away from.
Refreshed annually. The bar gets higher, never lower.
Filter 1 — Credentials & current practice
Board certification verified directly with the issuing council (NMC, GMC, ABMS, MOH). We confirm the applicant is currently practicing — not retired, not exclusively administrative, not consulting from a beach. 23% of applicants are screened out at this stage.
Filter 2 — Experience floor
Minimum eight years post-residency, no exceptions. For our Senior tier, 15 years and fellowship-trained. For Expert, 20 years and a department-head or professorial appointment. Junior doctors are wonderful; second opinions are not the place to learn the craft on a real case.
Filter 3 — No financial conflicts
We reject doctors with active financial relationships to labs, imaging centers, pharma, or medical device companies that would be plausibly recommended in their specialty. Lecture fees and research grants are disclosed and case-by-case reviewed; honorariums from product launches are disqualifying.
Interview 1 — Practice philosophy
A 45-minute structured interview with our medical director. We're listening for: comfort with uncertainty, willingness to disagree with referring doctors, and the absence of the "more is more" reflex. Doctors who default to "let's get one more scan, just in case" rarely make it past this stage.
Interview 2 — Writing sample
We send three anonymised case files and ask for written opinions in our house format. We score on: clarity in plain language, intellectual honesty about what's uncertain, and willingness to recommend the boring answer when it's the right one. Florid prose is fine; padding is not.
Reference calls
Two unstructured 30-minute conversations with peers the applicant has named. We ask the same five questions of each — half are about clinical judgment, half are about character. Of the two, the character calls turn up more disqualifying information.
Test case
The final filter. The applicant takes one live (but anonymised and with patient consent) case from our queue, alongside two existing roster doctors. We compare opinions side-by-side and discuss disagreements. This is where most well-intentioned applicants discover the bar is higher than they expected.
Ongoing — annual re-vetting
Every doctor is re-verified annually: board certification refreshed, conflicts re-declared, a random sample of their recent opinions audited for quality by our clinical reviewer. Five doctors have been removed from the network in the past 18 months — three voluntarily after we flagged concerns, two not.
Your case, read by three sets of eyes, by morning.
Start writing — you don't pay anything until a doctor's been assigned and you say "yes, send my file." If you change your mind, your case quietly closes.