Methodology

How we source, verify, and publish every provider in the directory.

The publishing gate

No provider page appears publicly unless the record satisfies all four of these checks:

  1. Valid NPI — active, NPI-1 (individual), taxonomy in the menopause-relevant set (OB/GYN, reproductive endocrinology, endocrinology, internal medicine, family medicine).
  2. Current state medical license — verified against the state board for the provider's practice address. Providers flagged for discipline, suspension, or revocation are excluded until their status clears.
  3. At least one menopause credential — MSCP (Menopause Society Certified Practitioner), NAMS legacy certification, or ABMS board certification in OB/GYN, Internal Medicine, Endocrinology, or Family Medicine.
  4. Clinic-verified HRT signal — the affiliated clinic website shows an explicit hormone-therapy / menopause service menu, not just a passing mention.

Records that fail any one of those conditions sit in an internal drafts queue with the specific missing reasons recorded. They never render a public page.

Primary sources we verify against

  • CMS NPPES — the federal National Plan & Provider Enumeration System. Source of the NPI, taxonomy, practice address, and credentials text field. npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov
  • State medical boards — each state's licensure lookup (e.g. Medical Board of California, New York OPMC, Texas Medical Board). We link directly to the board lookup on every provider page so you can re-verify a license yourself in one click.
  • ABMS CertificationMatters — the American Board of Medical Specialties' consumer verification portal. Board certification status and expiration date. certificationmatters.org
  • The Menopause Society — MSCP certificate holders (the credential formerly known as NAMS-CMP). When a provider is MSCP-credentialed, the profile links to the Menopause Society certificate lookup.
  • State disciplinary action feeds — we cross-check public board-action records in the provider's state and exclude anyone currently disciplined. This is an exclusion filter, not a display field.
  • PubMed author lookup — non-blocking authority signal. If a clinician has published menopause-relevant peer-reviewed work, we note the count. It is never a substitute for the core credential bar.
  • Clinic website — to confirm HRT is actually offered at the listed practice, and to record which modalities (oral, patch, pellet, compounded, vaginal, testosterone, progesterone, DHEA) and insurance plans the clinic accepts.

Every credential links to its source

On every provider page, every credential badge carries a Verify link that takes you directly to the primary source we used (the state board license lookup, the ABMS certificate, the NPI registry entry). This is the load-bearing piece of the whole directory. If a verify link ever 404s or disagrees with what we display, that is a correction we want to hear about.

How clinic data is enriched

Modalities offered, insurance accepted, and telehealth availability are extracted from the clinic's own public website using a structured-extraction pass. The extraction is schema-locked: it returns fixed enums (e.g. modality: oral_hrt | patch | pellet | bioidentical_compounded | vaginal_estrogen | testosterone | progesterone | dhea) with no free-text bio prose. No LLM-generated biographical content appears anywhere on a provider page — everything shown is either a primary-source fact or a structured field extracted from a clinic's own marketing copy.

When clinic-website extraction cannot confirm HRT is offered at the listed address, the provider stays in drafts. We do not publish providers on the assumption that a board-certified OB/GYN "probably" treats menopause.

What we don't do

  • No pay-to-list, no pay-to-rank. Clinicians cannot buy inclusion, placement, or a "featured" slot.
  • No AI-written bios. We never invent clinical background prose. If you see a sentence about a clinician, it was extracted from their own website, their NPI record, or their primary-source credential.
  • No broken credentials. If a board certification expired or a license went inactive, the provider is unpublished within one refresh cycle.
  • No hormone-therapy protocol advice. Treatment pages describe what a modality is and how it's typically prescribed; they do not prescribe.

Refresh cadence

NPI and ABMS checks rerun monthly. State license status reruns quarterly (or faster for states with real-time lookup). Clinic-website extraction reruns when a clinic's site changes materially or on a six-month floor, whichever comes first. Every provider page displays the date its credentials were last verified.

Limits of this data

Primary-source data is the best public evidence of a clinician's credentials — but it does not capture bedside manner, listening skills, whether a provider is currently accepting new patients, or whether they prescribe the specific modality a patient wants. We try to surface modality and insurance data where clinics publish it; we do not substitute for a first visit.

MSCP / NAMS certification itself has limits: fewer than two thousand US clinicians hold it, and many excellent menopause prescribers are board-certified without the optional MSCP overlay. The credential bar here is designed as a floor, not a ceiling.

Found something wrong?

If a credential is stale, a provider has retired, a verify link is broken, or a clinic page no longer describes HRT services — we want to know. Credential accuracy is the only thing this site is for.