Editorial Policy
How Zavis decides what to publish, who reviews it, how we handle commercial relationships, and how we correct errors. This policy applies to every page on the site — directory listings, doctor profiles, the Intelligence editorial layer, reports and the machine-readable data we expose.
Editorial independence
Zavis editorial content is produced independently from any commercial operation that Zavis runs. Directory listings are never influenced by advertising, sponsorship or business development relationships. Provider rankings on hub pages are determined by publicly available signals — Google rating average and review volume — applied uniformly to every facility on the page. The Intelligence editorial team has its own editor, its own review process and the standing authority to decline coverage that compromises independence. No member of the commercial team has approval rights over story selection, headline framing, sourcing or timing.
Conflicts of interest
Where Zavis has a commercial relationship with a healthcare provider, payer, government entity or vendor that is the subject of a Zavis Intelligence article, that relationship is disclosed in a clearly labelled note at the top of the article. The same disclosure rule applies to investments held by Zavis or by Zavis principals. External medical reviewers (see our masthead) are required to disclose any consulting, board or advisory relationships with the entities they review. Authors must disclose any financial relationship that a reasonable reader would consider relevant to the article they are writing — and in cases where disclosure is not sufficient to remove the conflict, the article is reassigned.
Sources and verification
Provider listings are anchored to official emirate-issued registers — DHA Sheryan for Dubai, DOH for Abu Dhabi, MOHAP for the Northern Emirates. Doctor profiles are anchored to the DHA Sheryan professional register. Editorial articles prioritise primary sources — DHA circulars, DOH dashboards, federal cabinet decisions, regulator press releases, exchange filings, peer-reviewed publications, and named on-record interviews — over secondary press summaries. Where primary sources are not available, we say so. Clinical articles cite their sources in a numbered Sources section at the foot of the page (DOIs and PubMed IDs where applicable). The full list of every primary data source feeding the site is published at /data-sources.
Review process
Every Intelligence article passes through a two-editor review before publication. Articles classified as clinical or YMYL (your money or your life) — anything covering disease, drugs, diagnostics, mental health, chronic conditions or patient-facing medical decisions — are additionally reviewed by a named external clinical or policy reviewer drawn from our published reviewer roster. The reviewer's name, credentials and specialty appear on the byline as "Medically reviewed by" with a link back to the reviewer's full Zavis profile. Reviewer placeholders seeded with no real expert assignment are kept offline until a real reviewer has been confirmed; we never publish a "Dr. TBD" or anonymous reviewer line.
Honest dates and updates
An article's dateModified only moves forward when a human re-reads the piece and either confirms it is still current or makes substantive edits. We do not bulk re-stamp old articles to game search freshness signals — a practice common in healthcare content marketing that misleads readers about what is current and what is not. The lastReviewed date on a clinical article tracks the date the named medical reviewer last signed off, and the structured-data layer carries it as a separate field from dateModified so search engines can reason about both honestly.
AI-assisted content disclosure
Some Intelligence summaries use AI-assisted summarisation of content sourced from official RSS feeds, government press releases and verified industry publications. Every AI-assisted summary is reviewed for accuracy by a Zavis editor before publication and is clearly attributed to its original source. The directory listing data itself — facility names, addresses, licence numbers, categories — is never AI-generated. It comes from the official register only.
Use of patient data and PDPL compliance
Zavis operates under the UAE Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data (PDPL). We do not collect, store or publish identifiable patient information. Future verified-review intake (described at /verified-reviews) will follow PDPL with explicit, granular consent before any messaging is sent, a documented retention window, and a right to erasure on request.
Corrections
Email corrections to [email protected]. We acknowledge every request within two business days, verify against primary sources and publish corrections within five to seven business days where the change is supported. Significant corrections are recorded in the published corrections log at /about/corrections. Inline correction notes are added to affected articles and the article's dateModified moves forward to reflect the correction. The full corrections SLA, dispute process and escalation path live on the corrections page.