How we verify every listing

The funnel, in numbers

1. Discovery

We searched public Google Maps listings in 12 US metros: Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Tampa, Scottsdale/Phoenix, Denver, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, San Diego and Las Vegas. Each metro got four searches: peptide therapy clinic, NAD IV therapy, medical weight loss semaglutide clinic, and hormone replacement therapy clinic. We removed duplicates, listings without a website, and categories that clearly aren’t clinics, such as supplement stores, pharmacies, gyms and salons. We used each listing’s name, address, map coordinates and website as a starting point. We don’t copy or show Google ratings or reviews.

2. The clinic’s own website is the source of truth

For each candidate, we fetched the homepage plus up to six relevant internal pages, such as services, treatments, weight loss, hormones, peptides, IV menu, telehealth and contact. Our crawler respects robots.txt and pauses between requests. We then looked for specific terms:

• Peptide therapy: "peptide therapy", "peptide injections", or named peptides such as BPC-157, ipamorelin, CJC-1295, thymosin, PT-141, TB-500 or GHK-Cu.
• GLP-1 / medical weight loss: semaglutide, tirzepatide, GLP-1, "medical weight loss", or weight-loss injections/program/medication.
• NAD+: NAD+ named together with IV, infusion, injection, drip, shot or therapy.
• Hormone therapy: hormone replacement, HRT, BHRT, bioidentical hormones, testosterone replacement or TRT, hormone optimization, pellet therapy.
• Sermorelin: the word sermorelin.
• Telehealth: telehealth, telemedicine, virtual consults or visits, online consultations.

A service is tagged only if the term appears at least twice, or on a page whose address is about that service. That keeps out one-off blog mentions. Each listing shows the exact terms we found and links to the page where we found them.

3. Exclusions

• Product shops, not clinics. Virtual Care Atlas is for clinical care. Any site that says its products are not for human use, which is how online peptide shops label their goods, is excluded, even if it also mentions clinical services.
• No clinical signal. The site has to mention clinical staff or roles, such as a physician, MD/DO, nurse practitioner, PA, provider or medical director.
• Unverifiable contact details. We must confirm the listed phone number or street address on the clinic’s own site or its NPI record.

4. NPI Registry cross-check

We query the free CMS NPPES NPI Registry for organization (Type 2) records in the clinic’s ZIP code. We record a match only when both of these are true: a distinctive word in the clinic’s name appears in the organization’s legal or "doing business as" name, and the practice-location street number or phone number matches. When there’s no match, we say so. That isn’t a mark against the clinic, because many practices bill under individual clinicians’ NPIs.

5. No thin pages, no doorways

• A city page exists only when a city has 3 or more verified clinics. Clinics in smaller towns appear on their state page.
• A treatment × state page, such as "peptide therapy in Texas", exists only when 3 or more verified clinics in that state list the treatment.
• We never create pages for places where we have no verified clinics.

6. What we deliberately don’t publish

• No ratings, reviews, scores or "best" rankings. We publish verifiable facts, not opinions about care quality.
• No prices. Clinics rarely publish complete, comparable prices, and we couldn’t verify them consistently.
• No paid placement. Listings are free. Order is alphabetical, or by distance on clinic pages.
• No medical claims. We don’t say any treatment works. Treatment guides cite FDA, the Federal Register and peer-reviewed sources.

7. Editorial review: who checks what

Every page is reviewed by the Virtual Care Atlas Editorial Team. That's a team, not a credentialed individual. This is an editorial fact-check, not a clinical or medical review, and nothing on Virtual Care Atlas is medical advice.

• Listings: a second team member spot-checks a sample of each verification run against the clinic's live website: name, address, phone, the services named, and the source link we show. Disagreements are resolved by re-crawling, never by guessing.
• Treatment guides and explainers: each regulatory or research statement must link to a primary source (an FDA page, a Federal Register notice, a PubMed record). Before a guide is published or updated, a reviewer re-opens each cited source and confirms the wording matches. Trial numbers are copied from the abstract, never paraphrased into stronger claims.
• What we won't publish: dosing instructions, outcome promises, rankings or ratings of clinics, or claims that a compounded product equals an FDA-approved one.
• Dates: each guide shows the date of its last editorial review. Listings show the date they were last verified.

8. Freshness and corrections

Every listing shows its "verified" date. Clinic services change, so we plan to re-run the full pipeline regularly, and we re-check individual listings when a clinic or reader reports a problem through our claim or correct a listing page.

9. Known limitations

• Coverage is limited to 12 metros so far, and we don’t claim to list every clinic in them.
• Automated term matching can miss services described in unusual words or shown only in images or booking widgets. It can also occasionally tag a service the clinic has stopped offering. That’s why every tag links to its source.
• Map positions come from public map listings and may be approximate for suites inside large buildings.

What we don't verify

• Individual licenses. We don't check each clinician's state license. Our vetting guide shows you how to check it yourself in two minutes.
• Prices, hours, insurance. These change often and are rarely published consistently, so we don't show them.
• Quality of care or outcomes. We don't rate, rank or review clinics, and we don't publish patient reviews.
• Which pharmacy a clinic uses, or whether a product is compounded. Ask the clinic.