What each badge means

So the two are never confused, they differ by more than colour: different shapes, different outlines, different letter weight, and only one carries an icon. The difference stays visible in a black-and-white photograph, and for someone who does not distinguish colours.

The metric is the NUMBER OF DISTINCT PATIENTS who left a verified review in the last 12 months. Not the rating, not the number of reviews, not a score built from several things. The reason is simple: a verified review requires a patient with a proven visit, so it is the hardest thing on the platform to fake.

We count PEOPLE, not reviews, and the difference matters: if we counted reviews, one acquaintance writing ten times would be worth ten patients. This way, they are worth one.

The cost of that choice, stated plainly: it favours seniority. A very good doctor who is new on the platform cannot enter the ranking straight away. They can get there within a year, as verified reviews accumulate, not sooner.

The comparison happens inside one of the three visit types: consultations (a visit with no procedure performed), procedures (non-invasive) and operations (surgery). A doctor is never compared with someone doing something entirely different, and the three rankings are independent: a doctor can hold all of them.

The patient states the visit type, not the doctor. It is the first question on the review form, and it cannot be skipped. We do not infer it from the services a doctor lists on their profile: if we did, a doctor could pick the ranking they compete in by changing a setting before each monthly calculation.

The minimum threshold is 5 distinct patients within a window of 12 months, for each visit type separately. Below it no badge is awarded, whatever the position in the ranking. Without a threshold, in a small group "first of all" could mean a doctor with two patients, so the badge would claim more about the ranking than it knows.

Reviews written before the visit-type question existed carry no answer and count towards no ranking. We would rather count less than count wrong.

It means that at most 10% of the doctors compared on that visit type carry the badge. Nothing more and nothing else.

On a tie, the whole group gets in or none of it does. When several doctors have exactly the same number of patients at the cut-off line, either they all receive the badge or none of them does. A doctor with 12 patients who gets the badge and another one also with 12 who does not would be a split we could not defend to either of them.

The ranking is recalculated monthly. The badge is lost on its own when the doctor falls outside the 12 months window, with no intervention from us and without any sanction being involved.

The sanction hits exactly what the doctor tried to buy: visibility. The scale has three steps, and the counter is per doctor.

1. First confirmed breach: a restriction of 30 days.
2. Second: a restriction of 90 days.
3. Third: delisting.

The counter expires after 12 months, the same notion of "recent" as the badge window. Otherwise the scale would become "two mistakes for life", which is not a sanction but a sentence.

No sanction is applied automatically. A signal only PROPOSES a case for review; a person confirms or rejects it, and the decision is recorded with an author and a timestamp. No algorithm demotes anyone on its own.

Delisting means the profile leaves the map, the search, the public listings and the site map, but stays reachable through a direct link, with its reviews intact. Nothing is deleted. It is not the end of the service, it is the end of the promotion.

While a sanction runs, the earned badge is suspended. It returns on its own at the first monthly recalculation after it expires, if the doctor still meets the conditions.

The policy is public; the cases stay anonymous. We describe the mechanism and we can publish aggregate figures, but we never name a sanctioned doctor. The sanction shows in the position, not in a label on the profile.

What we verify: that the author of a review really was a patient, through one of the proof paths, and that the number of reviews a badge rests on is real.

What we do NOT verify, and could not: the outcome of a procedure. A badge does not guarantee that an operation will go well, and nobody can guarantee that. It is a ranking of collected evidence, not a promise of results.

When we display information taken from public sources, we say so explicitly and we attribute it to the clinic, not to the doctor. We never present it as reviews written on the platform.