Methodology v1
MajorInitial ranking framework — the universal factor spine (importance tiers: Critical, High, Medium, Supporting) with per-category overlays. This was the lens the first scoring ran against; on its own it never produced a public score.
Impact on live scores
No live provider score changed under this version.
Why we made this change
Establish one open, never-for-sale standard so every provider is measured on the same independently-verifiable signals — not reputation, not ad spend.
The full rationale
Version 1 established the framework every FindDrugs ranking is built on: a single, public scoring lens applied identically to every provider. Rather than a black box, the methodology is a spine of universal factors — the dimensions that matter for any telehealth provider, whatever it treats — plus a set of category-specific overlays for the things that only matter in one area, such as titration autonomy for GLP-1 or informed-consent honesty for hair loss.
Each factor carries a published importance tier — Critical, High, Medium, or Supporting — and never a numeric weight. Tiers communicate what matters most while keeping the ranking robust against gaming and free of false precision. The private weights that turn tiers into a computed score are frozen and never published.
v1 was the lens the first scoring ran against. On its own it never produced a public provider score — it defined what would be measured and how importance would be expressed, so that every later revision could be stated as an honest, dated change against this baseline.
- No live provider score moved — v1 is the baseline framework, not a recompute.
- It set the universal spine plus per-category overlays that every later version is measured against.
- Importance is expressed only as a tier; the numeric weights stay frozen and private.