Review policy

Only patients can review a doctor here, and only after a visit. Reviewers sign in with a one-time code or Google, give their name, contact and area once (on the review form itself, never published), rate the visit from 1 to 5 stars on set questions — knowledge, explanation, services and care, courtesy of doctor and staff, hygiene, waiting time, plus questions specific to the speciality — and may add an optional comment. Any question that does not apply can be marked N/A. We do not ask patients to rate treatment effectiveness, because a review cannot measure clinical outcome or causality.

Rules we hold to

• No ratings or review text imported from any other platform.
• No self-reviews by doctors or staff, no competitor reviews, no incentives, no review gating. Doctors may share their review link with all of their patients, not a chosen few.
• The site asks, not the doctor. Every patient who books an appointment through The Doctor Index is emailed once, after the visit, with a link to review it — every patient, not a selection. A review written from that link is tied to the booking and carries the “Verified visit” badge on the site’s own record of the appointment, with nothing to upload. Appointments marked as no-shows or cancelled are never asked.
• Reviewers appear as their first name and surname initial (“Anita S.”) unless they choose to be shown as “Reviewer A.S.” instead. A moderator always sees the account; the doctor never sees a full name, mobile or email.
• A reviewer without a booking may attach the prescription from the visit (or a bill or appointment confirmation from the same doctor). A moderator checks the document before the review is published; a review whose document checks out carries the “Verified visit” badge, and a review whose document is found to be false is rejected. The document is private, seen by one moderator, and deleted as soon as the review is decided — in any case within 30 days of upload. We keep only the record that the check happened.
• Reviews without a document are published too, after the same moderation, without the badge. Every review is tied to a real, contactable account (name, mobile and email), one review per person per doctor.
• Every policy-compliant review is published, positive or negative.
• No doctor can pay to remove a review or suppress criticism.
• “Verified visit” appears only on reviews tied to a booking that took place or whose document was checked; the booking reference or the date of the check is recorded.
• Doctors may post one reply and must not reveal or confirm any health information in it. A doctor may also dispute a review; the dispute is decided by a moderator other than the one who published it, and the review stays visible unless it breaches this policy.
• Three or more reviews for one doctor from the same device or network address in a day are held for a person to look at before any of them is published.
• Allegations of malpractice, criminal conduct, fraud or threats go to a trained escalation queue, not to ordinary moderation.

Before you write

Do not include diagnoses, report contents, phone numbers, addresses or anything that identifies another patient. Our checks flag this, and a moderator redacts it.

Internal response targets

These are our internal targets. The published statutory grievance timeline is separate and governs.

Other policies

• Verification methodology — What each verification label on a doctor profile means, which source it was checked against, and how often it is re-checked.
• Ranking and sorting — The published weights behind organic result order, and our commitment that payment is never an input to it.
• Corrections, appeals and takedowns — How to challenge anything on a public page, how removal and merges are handled, and what provenance we keep.
• Editorial and medical review policy — Who writes and reviews health content on this site, how sources are handled, and what we will not publish.
• Advertising and sponsorship policy — What can and cannot be paid for on this platform, and how anything sponsored is separated and labelled.
• Privacy policy — What personal data this platform collects, why, for how long, and the rights you have over it under the DPDP Act.
• Terms of use — The rules for using the directory, for doctors listing on it, and for anyone posting a review.
• Grievance process — How to raise a complaint about a profile, a review, your data or the platform, who handles it, and the timelines that apply.