BioTB
Commercial Independence

Advertising and Editorial Independence Policy

When you compare cardiologists in Lucknow or orthopaedic surgeons in Delhi NCR on BioTB, the order you see must reflect the evidence on each provider's record, not who has a commercial relationship with us. This policy sets out the rules that keep money away from rankings, reviews and clinical content, and how anything commercial is labelled so you can always tell it apart.

Medically reviewed by the BioTB Medical Advisory BoardThis policy last reviewed Editorial policy

Zero pay-to-rank

BioTB operates a zero pay-to-rank policy. In concrete terms:

  • Rankings cannot be bought. No payment, subscription, partnership or sponsorship changes a provider's TrustScore™ or position.
  • There are no sponsored rankings. Paid placement never appears inside a ranked list of doctors, hospitals, clinics or labs.
  • Verified patient reviews cannot be removed, hidden or reordered in exchange for payment.
  • Providers do not pay to be profiled, and a provider that declines any commercial offer is scored exactly as before.

How BioTB is funded overall is described on our About BioTB page. Whatever the source of revenue, the rules on this page apply to it.

What decides a ranking

Every provider's TrustScore™ is computed only from six weighted signals, each scored from 0 to 10 using the facts on the profile. For doctors, the six signals are:

  1. Credentials and training (25%): postgraduate and super-specialty degrees, fellowships and memberships.
  2. Experience and seniority (20%): years in practice and senior designations such as Head of Department.
  3. Hospital standing (20%): the TrustScore™, accreditation (NABH, NABL, JCI) and scale of the attached hospitals.
  4. Practice depth (15%): conditions treated, procedures performed, sub-specialties, and any academic or award record.
  5. Access and transparency (10%): published OPD timings, consultation fee, contact number and location.
  6. Profile completeness (10%): the share of fields on record from a cited source, and how recently the profile was reviewed.

Hospitals and other facilities are scored on their own six signals: accreditation, scale and infrastructure, clinical breadth, the medical team profiled on BioTB, access (including emergency access for hospitals), and profile completeness. Each doctor is then ranked against others of the same specialty in the same city.

None of these inputs is commercial. There is no field for payment, partnership status or advertising spend in the scoring engine, and the engine is deterministic: the same facts always produce the same score. The full formula is published on the TrustScore™ ranking index, and how each fact is checked is set out in our verification methodology.

Advertising and sponsorship are kept separate from rankings and reviews

Commercial decisions and editorial decisions are made separately. The people who agree any commercial arrangement have no access to change TrustScore™ inputs, ranking order, review moderation or clinical content, and the clinical editorial team does not take commercial status into account when it verifies a profile, handles a correction or moderates a review.

A provider with a commercial relationship with BioTB goes through exactly the same verification, the same review moderation rules and the same corrections process as every other provider. If it asks for something those policies do not allow, such as removing a critical verified review, the answer is the same.

What we do not accept

We do not accept money, gifts or other benefits in exchange for:

  • a higher TrustScore™, a better rank or a place in a "top doctors" or "best hospitals" list;
  • removing, hiding or delaying a verified patient review, or publishing a review that has not been verified;
  • changing a condition guide, or a BioTB Match™ specialty suggestion, to favour a provider, product or treatment;
  • omitting a competitor from a page or a comparison.

We also do not accept advertising for prescription medicines, for treatments presented as cures for serious disease without evidence, or for products whose claims we would not allow in our own clinical content.

No pharmaceutical promotion in clinical guides

Our condition guides are written to recognised clinical guidelines and peer-reviewed evidence. They contain no pharmaceutical promotion. Where a guide discusses medicines, it uses generic names and drug classes, not brands, and it describes options in proportion to the evidence rather than to any commercial interest. No pharmaceutical company, device maker, hospital or doctor can sponsor, pre-approve or edit a clinical guide.

Medical Advisory Board conflict-of-interest disclosure

Clinicians who review content for BioTB disclose their relevant financial and professional interests, including hospital appointments, consulting or speaking arrangements with pharmaceutical or device companies, and ownership interests in healthcare businesses. A reviewer does not review content where a disclosed interest could reasonably be seen to affect their judgement, such as a guide on a procedure their own hospital markets heavily, and the content is assigned to another reviewer.

The Board's role, governance and full conflict-of-interest rules are published on the Medical Advisory Board page.

How to report suspected paid placement

If you believe a ranking, a review or a page on BioTB has been influenced by payment, or if anyone claiming to represent BioTB offers a better rank or review removal in exchange for money, please tell us at clinical-editorial@biotb.com. Include the page link, what you saw, and any message or offer you received.

Every report is investigated by the clinical editorial team. If a placement turns out to be mislabelled or a ranking turns out to rest on an incorrect fact, we correct it under our corrections policy. If you are not satisfied with how we handled your report, you can escalate it through our grievance redressal process.

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