Coverage & sources

The sources themselves

Overture Maps Places and Foursquare OS Places

Open business datasets, used under CDLA-Permissive-2.0 and Apache 2.0 respectively. They tell us a business exists, roughly where, and often its website. They are not authoritative about what a business does. Category data is a starting filter, and what a business actually is gets decided by reading its own site. They also cannot tell us when a business has closed.

The business’s own website

The only source of clinician names on this site. Our crawler identifies itself, obeys robots.txt, and every extracted name is a literal slice of the page we stored, quoted with the date it was read. See about our crawler.

The NPI Registry (NPPES)

A free federal directory of healthcare providers who bill payers. It confirms identity and points at the right board. Its license numbers are self-reported at enrolment and never maintained, so they are a signpost and never the evidence. Not all registered nurses obtain an individual NPI, so a missing NPI does not affect the state-license check.

State license registers

The evidence. We quote each board’s own status word: Florida says “Clear”, Texas says “Active”. We record the date the board published the file as well as the date we read it. A register is a historical record: being present in it is not the same as being licensed today, which is why the status word and both dates travel together.

Why coverage is uneven

Every state licenses the same clinicians. Very few publish that fact the same way.

• Florida publishes its full licensee file (nurses, nurse practitioners, physicians and physician assistants) as a free download. Every credential a med spa is likely to employ is checkable.
• Texas publishes its medical and physician-assistant data, but the nursing register is distributed on physical media by mail and has not arrived. A Dallas clinic staffed by nurse injectors cannot be checked, however good its disclosure is, so we have taken Dallas off this site until it can. We would rather show no Texas listings than listings we can only half check.
• Arizona publishes no downloadable nursing register, and its other boards sit behind access controls we will not work around. Phoenix listings therefore show businesses and named staff, and no license rows at all.

Where we can check a state and the answer is nothing, we show the honest zero rather than quietly leaving the market out. Where we cannot check a state at all, as in Texas today, we take the market off the site and say so here, because a page of half-checked listings would read as a verdict on those clinics when it is a gap in the register.

What we do not use

• Other directories. Nothing here is copied from a competitor listing.
• Purchased scraped data.
• Ratings, reviews, or user-submitted reports about a clinic’s quality.
• An adverse finding from a cached file. It routes to a person for live confirmation rather than to a page.

How each status is decided from these sources is set out in the methodology.