Methodology

Verification Standard v2.4, effective 29 September 2026. Ruleset v2.4-2026-09-29. See changes to the standard.

Who do we check?

We read the clinic's own website, identify the clinicians it publicly names, and check each one who holds a medical or nursing credential, or whom the clinic calls Dr., against the state licensing board's records. Staff without a medical or nursing credential, such as aestheticians, are not checked. We do not verify anyone the clinic does not name.

Where do we check?

At the state licensing board that issued the clinician’s credential, using the board’s own records. An NPI record is identity information. It never makes a clinic Verified; only a match to a current state licensing board record can. You can check the same records yourself: how to check an injector’s license yourself.

What earns Verified?

A clinic is Verified when every clinician it names whom we check matches a current state license, someone it names matches a physician license, and someone it names is not named only as the medical director, unless the only clinician the clinic names is a physician who is not listed as medical director at another practice. Two more rules apply where a clinic names an aesthetician or has two to five addresses.

Every clinician we check matches a current license. Every clinician it names whom we check was searched and matched to a current, active record at the state licensing board, checked within the last 120 days. We check everyone it names with a medical or nursing credential, and everyone it calls Dr. A credential the national registry or a state register supplied for that person counts here beside one the clinic printed. A clinician we could not match, or could not search, holds the clinic at Partly checked.
A physician license is matched. Someone it names is matched to a physician license, whether or not the clinic prints MD or DO beside that person's name, and whether or not the clinic prints a credential for them at all. A nurse practitioner or physician assistant titled medical director is not counted as the physician. A job title makes nobody a physician; a physician license does.
Not only a medical director. Someone it names is not named only as the medical director (a clinician whose role is not stated counts). A physician matched to a physician license who is the only clinician the clinic names counts here even when named only as the medical director, unless that physician is listed as medical director at another practice. A physician listed as medical director at more than one practice is not counted as the injector at any clinic. One physician can meet the first three rules.
Aestheticians. Where a clinic names an aesthetician, facial specialist or cosmetologist, that person counts as checked only if the clinic prints a medical or nursing credential for them or the national registry identified them; a license matched to their name alone is not enough. A clinic naming one who is not checked that way is Verified only if it also names a nurse.
Clinics with two to five addresses. Where a clinic has two to five addresses and its website does not say which address each clinician works at, each address is judged on its own state's records: every clinician listed there whom we check must match a current license in that state, whatever another state's records say, and a physician must match one there. A physician the website names whom no register in any state identified is not listed at an address and does not count against it.

Can a clinic pay to become Verified?

No. Every listing is checked whether or not the clinic pays us, and no plan, badge or payment changes a status. Paid placement buys visibility and presentation, and it is marked as paid.

What Verified does not mean

It does not evaluate clinical skill, judgement or technique.
It does not evaluate treatment outcomes or patient experience.
It does not guarantee the safety or quality of any treatment.
It does not cover anyone the clinic does not name on its website.
It does not report disciplinary history beyond what the licensing board's own record shows.

What each clinician’s line can say

When a clinic names a clinician, each check we run on that person ends in one of these states. Only the first is a positive finding, and none of the others is a finding against anybody.

Verified. A current, active record at the state licensing board matched this clinician on the date shown.
Not matched. No license record matched this name with enough certainty. That is not a finding about this person.
Record found, being confirmed. A license record was found under this name that we have not confirmed as current. We check these with the board before publishing anything about them.
Not checked yet, register not held. We do not hold the licensing board's database, so this license was not searched. That is not a finding about this person.
Could not be checked. The board's register could not be searched for this person, and the record says why in words, for example a search behind a CAPTCHA or a register published only as a PDF. That is not a finding about this person.

A clinic that names nobody has no clinician lines at all. It is shown as Not disclosed: This clinic does not name any clinician on its website. That is a fact about what the clinic publishes, not a finding against it.

Where the businesses come from

From two open business datasets published under permissive licenses: Overture Maps Places and Foursquare OS Places. We do not take listings from other directories, and we do not buy scraped data.

Neither source is complete, and neither is authoritative about whether a business is a medical spa. Category data is a starting filter; what a business actually does is decided by reading its own website.

How a clinician gets onto a listing

Only by being named on the business’s own website. We read up to six pages per site: the homepage, the team or about page, the main treatment page and the contact page. We record the page and the date we read it.

We do not add clinicians from any other source. If a business does not publish who performs treatment, we have nobody to check, and the listing says so.

How a credential is checked

Identity. Where a clinician has one, the name and stated credential are matched against the NPI Registry, a public federal source, as supporting identity information. A match is only asserted where exactly one candidate clears the bar; where two people share a name, we decline rather than choose.
License status. The name is then checked against the license register of the state board that issues that credential. We quote the board’s own wording: “Clear” in Florida, “Active” in Texas, never our paraphrase.
Evidence. Every published claim carries the source, the date we read it, and the date the source published the file it came from.

An NPI is not a license check. The license numbers on an NPI record are self-reported when a provider enrols and are never maintained afterwards. They tell us which board to ask; the board’s answer is the evidence.

What each clinic status means

A note on the words. Verified is used in one narrow sense only, the rule stated above. The other two states say checked, not verified, and that is deliberate: they describe what we managed to do, not what a business achieved. “Not yet verified” reads as a failed application; a business that publishes no names has not applied for anything and has not failed anything.

Verified

Every clinician we check matches a current license. Every clinician it names whom we check was searched and matched to a current, active record at the state licensing board, checked within the last 120 days. We check everyone it names with a medical or nursing credential, and everyone it calls Dr. A credential the national registry or a state register supplied for that person counts here beside one the clinic printed. A clinician we could not match, or could not search, holds the clinic at Partly checked.
A physician license is matched. Someone it names is matched to a physician license, whether or not the clinic prints MD or DO beside that person's name, and whether or not the clinic prints a credential for them at all. A nurse practitioner or physician assistant titled medical director is not counted as the physician. A job title makes nobody a physician; a physician license does.
Not only a medical director. Someone it names is not named only as the medical director (a clinician whose role is not stated counts). A physician matched to a physician license who is the only clinician the clinic names counts here even when named only as the medical director, unless that physician is listed as medical director at another practice. A physician listed as medical director at more than one practice is not counted as the injector at any clinic. One physician can meet the first three rules.
Aestheticians. Where a clinic names an aesthetician, facial specialist or cosmetologist, that person counts as checked only if the clinic prints a medical or nursing credential for them or the national registry identified them; a license matched to their name alone is not enough. A clinic naming one who is not checked that way is Verified only if it also names a nurse.
Clinics with two to five addresses. Where a clinic has two to five addresses and its website does not say which address each clinician works at, each address is judged on its own state's records: every clinician listed there whom we check must match a current license in that state, whatever another state's records say, and a physician must match one there. A physician the website names whom no register in any state identified is not listed at an address and does not count against it.

It is a statement about licenses on a date. It is not a statement about the quality, safety or outcome of any treatment.

Partly checked

Some checks completed and some did not. The commonest reasons are that the only person named is the medical director, who supervises but may not treat anyone, that one clinician’s credential belongs to a register we do not hold, or that a clinician the clinic names could not be matched to a license record.

Not yet checked

Usually because the business does not name any credentialed clinician on its website. About half of the businesses we looked at are in this position. This is not a finding against them. Many well-run clinics simply do not publish staff names.

Is Verified Injector a licensing board or accreditation organization?

No. Verified Injector is an independent directory. Professional licenses are issued and regulated by state licensing boards, which remain the definitive source for current license status.

What we will not do

Publish an adverse finding from a cached file. If a bulk register suggests a license is expired or suspended, we do not display it. A stale record about a clinician who has since renewed is a false statement about their professional standing, and it routes to a human for live confirmation instead.
Sell a verification outcome or a ranking position. Paid placement buys visibility and presentation. It never buys a better status, and listings are ordered by how complete a clinic’s public record is, and that order is named on every market page with A–Z one control away.
Charge to correct our own mistake. A wrong business, a name we misread, a license matched to the wrong person, or a failure to match where the names are identical: those are ours, and fixing them is free. What counts as our mistake is set out in full, along with the two things that look like errors and are not.
Publish ratings or reviews. We hold none.

What we cannot tell you

Whether an unnamed person is licensed. If a clinic advertises “expert nurse injectors” without naming them, there is nothing to check.
Who actually performs your treatment. We check the people a business names. We cannot know who is rostered on the day of your appointment.
Whether a licensed clinician is a good one. A current license means a board has not withdrawn it. It is a floor, not a recommendation.
Anything about states whose registers we do not hold. Coverage differs by state and by credential, and every market page says exactly which is which.

Changes to the standard

When the rules change, the standard gets a new version and a new ruleset id, and every status we store records the ruleset that produced it, so a status computed under old rules can always be told apart from one computed under current rules.

Verification Standard v2.4, effective 29 September 2026: Ruleset v2.4-2026-09-29. A physician matched to a physician license who is the only clinician a clinic names counts toward Verified even when the clinic names that physician only as its medical director, unless that physician is listed as medical director at another practice. A physician listed as medical director at more than one practice is not counted as the injector at any clinic. A nurse practitioner or physician assistant titled medical director, and a medical director named beside other clinicians, are otherwise read as before.
Verification Standard v2.3, effective 26 September 2026: Ruleset v2.3-2026-09-26. Verified only where every clinician we check was searched and matched: a clinician the clinic calls Dr. whom no register confirmed, one no license record matched, or one whose board's database we do not hold now holds the clinic at Partly checked, at every address of a clinic with several.
Verification Standard v2.2, effective 17 September 2026: Ruleset v2.2-2026-09-17. A person matched to a physician license counts as the physician however the clinic writes the page, and a credential the national registry or a state register supplied counts beside one the clinic printed. Where a clinic names an aesthetician, a license matched to her name alone does not make her checked: a credential has to say who she is, and otherwise the clinic is Verified only where it names a nurse as well.
Verification Standard v2.1, effective 10 September 2026: Ruleset v2.1-2026-09-10. Each address of a clinic with two to five addresses is judged on its own state: one physician matched there, and neither the clinic's other physicians nor an injector matched only in another of its states count against it.
Verification Standard v2, effective 10 September 2026: Ruleset v2-2026-09-10. A confirmed physician plus every listed clinician; a solo physician counts as both.
Verification Standard v1, effective 1 September 2026: Ruleset v1-2026-09-01. The first published standard.