Methodology v3

Version 3 is additive. The factor spine, the importance tiers, and the way each factor is scored are all unchanged from v2, so no per-treatment score moves under this version. What v3 adds is a new public score type: an operator-trust score shown on each provider hub.

A provider hub needed one honest headline number that reflects the operator itself, not any single treatment. The operator-trust score is the weighted mean of the company-level factors — the dimensions that measure the operator regardless of what it prescribes: legitimacy and accreditation, clinical oversight and safety, transparency, consumer sentiment, policy fairness, data privacy, popularity and momentum, quality under growth, access and speed, and support and care model.

We deliberately did not compute it by blending the per-treatment scores. Averaging them would double-count these company-level factors and break down when a provider operates in only one or two categories. Instead the operator-trust score reuses the shared-core signals already gathered for each treatment scorecard, so a provider hub and its individual treatment reviews can never contradict each other on a brand-level factor.

A new public number is a new claim, so it is versioned and dated even though it moved no existing score. The two per-treatment universal factors — pricing transparency and sourcing transparency — stay inside the vertical scores and are excluded from the operator meta, since cost and supply are treatment-specific rather than company-wide.

• New: a brand-level operator-trust score on every provider hub, shown out of 10 like every other FindDrugs score.
• Unchanged: the factor set, the importance tiers, the subscore derivation, and every existing per-treatment score.
• Scope: the operator-trust score is built only from the company-level factors; per-treatment factors such as pricing and sourcing remain in the vertical scores.
• Impact on live scores: none — additive only. No per-treatment provider score changed.