Listing completeness
Every clinic page carries a listing-completeness bar. It measures how much this directory has been able to publish about a clinic. It does not measure the quality of that clinic’s care.
What it counts
Ten checks, weighted to 100. Each one asks a single question: has this been published? A check is met or it is not; there is no partial credit and nothing is graded, because grading — treating a clinic listing twelve treatments as better than one listing four — would be a claim about the clinic rather than about the listing.
| Check | Weight | Published by | What it reads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website | 20 | The clinic | Whether a website address for this clinic has been published. |
| ART level stated | 15 | Registry | Whether the registry extract states the clinic’s ART level — L1 (IUI and work-up) or L2 (licensed for IVF and ICSI on site). |
| Registration year | 10 | Registry | Whether the registry extract states the year the clinic was registered. |
| Phone number | 12 | The clinic | Whether a phone number is published. |
| Treatments listed | 10 | The clinic | Whether at least one treatment the clinic offers is listed. |
| About this clinic | 9 | The clinic | Whether the clinic publishes a description of itself of at least 200 characters. |
| Opening hours | 8 | The clinic | Whether opening hours are published. |
| Email address | 8 | The clinic | Whether an email address is published. |
| Social profiles | 4 | The clinic | Whether at least one social profile is published. |
| Accreditations listed | 4 | The clinic | Whether at least one accreditation is listed. |
Two of the ten come from the registry, not from the clinic
The ART level and the year of registration are stated in the national ART and surrogacy registry, not published by the clinic itself. They are counted because this measure describes the listing a patient is looking at, and both facts appear on it. The table above names the source of every check so the two are never blurred.
A check that could not be run leaves the total
Seven of the ten checks can only be answered by reading a clinic’s own website. Where this directory holds a website address it has never successfully retrieved, or has not finished looking for one, those checks are not run — and a check that was not run is removed from both the score and the total it is measured out of. It is never counted as a failure. The distinction between “we looked and the clinic has not published this” and “nobody has looked yet” is the one this whole design turns on, and it is enforced by the database rather than by the program that writes the figures.
Each clinic page says how many of the ten checks were run for it, and lists every check that was not, in the words Not checked — never Not published.
Where fewer than six checks could be run, no figure is published at all
Removing a check from the total has a consequence that has to be stated plainly: a listing measured on three checks that meets all three would score 100, and it would be the listing this directory knows least about. That is not a defensible thing to publish, so it is not published. A completeness figure appears only where at least six of the ten checks could be run and at least 60 of the 100 points were available to be earned. Below that the bar renders empty and the page says that not enough of the listing has been checked yet.
As of the most recent run this closes the bar on 1,948 of 4,801 listings, every one of them because of an unfinished check of ours rather than anything about the clinic.
Why an unclaimed listing measures lower
An unclaimed listing measures lower because less has been published about it, not because the clinic is worse. Most listings in this directory were compiled from the national registry and from public sources, with no involvement from the clinic at all. A clinic that has never heard of this directory has published nothing to it, and the bar says exactly that and nothing more. A clinic that claims its listing and fills it in will measure higher, and that tells you about the listing rather than about the medicine.
It is also why this figure plays no part in ranking anything. Ordering clinic lists by how much they have published would reward attention to this directory, which is not a service to anyone looking for treatment.
How it is stored, and when it was computed
The figure is computed and stored rather than derived when the page loads: the ten check values, the total, the number of checks that were run, the reason any were not, and the version of the formula that produced them are all kept on the record. A figure shown on a Tuesday can therefore still be explained on a Friday, after the formula has moved on.
The rule that a check which could not be run leaves both the score and the total is enforced as a storage constraint, not as a convention in the program: a record that breaks it cannot be written at all. The publication threshold is a generated column on the same record, so a page cannot render a figure that has not passed it even by mistake.
Correcting it
If a clinic has published something this directory has missed — a website, opening hours, a treatment list — the fastest fix is a correction, which is free and does not require a claim. The bar moves at the next computation.
- Verified against cited public sources
- No paid placement, ever