Anyone can put a doctor’s name on a web page. The question a reader actually has is narrower and more useful: is the person who wrote this the person it is about? That is the only question verification on Guide.md answers — and it answers it properly.
What the verified badge means
A verified profile means one specific thing: the individual who controls this page proved their identity with a government-issued photo ID, and that identity matches the name registered against this NPI in the national registry.
- The person editing the page is who they say they are.
- They are the holder of this National Provider Identifier, not a marketing agency, a competitor, or a former employer.
- Anything they have written here, they have written under their own verified name.
What it does not mean
We are deliberate about this, because every other badge on the internet is vague about it.
- It is not a statement about clinical quality, outcomes, or safety.
- It is not confirmation of current licensure or board certification. Those are held by state boards and certifying bodies, and those bodies are the authority — not us.
- It is not a check on every sentence of a biography. A verified physician can still describe their own practice in their own words, and those words are theirs.
- It is not an endorsement, a recommendation, or a ranking signal we sell.
Where a specific field has been independently checked against a source, that field carries its own label saying so. A verified badge on the profile is about the person; a label on a field is about the fact.
How identity is checked
Identity verification is handled by Stripe Identity, the same infrastructure used by financial institutions to meet Know Your Customer obligations. We chose it over building our own for two reasons: it is materially better at detecting forged documents than anything we could write, and it means the sensitive part never touches our systems.
- You find your profile and start a claim.
- Stripe collects a government-issued photo ID and a live selfie, in their interface, on their servers.
- Stripe checks the document for tampering and matches the face to the photo.
- Stripe tells us pass or fail, and the name on the document. Nothing else.
- We match that name against the NPI record. If it matches, the profile is yours.
We never see or store your ID document. No image of your licence or passport is transmitted to Guide.md, held on our servers, or retained in our database. We receive a result and a name.
Why a physician-run directory does this differently
Guide.md is built by a practising physician, and the standard it holds itself to is the one we would want applied to our own names. Directories that let anyone with an email address “claim” a listing are not protecting the physician — they are protecting their own signup numbers. A profile that can be taken over by whoever gets there first is worse than no profile at all, because it carries an implied authority it has not earned.
Requiring real identity verification costs us signups. That is the point. The badge is only worth something if it is hard to get.
Organisations and practices
A clinic, hospital or group practice has an NPI of its own, and its profile can be claimed the same way — by an individual who verifies their identity and attests they are authorised to act for the organisation. The verified badge on an organisation page refers to that person’s identity and their stated authority, not to a corporate credential.
Losing verification
Verification is withdrawn if the underlying NPI is deactivated, if we are notified of a successful dispute over who controls the profile, or if we find the profile is being used to impersonate someone. If your profile is claimed by someone who is not you, email support@guide.md with your NPI. Impersonation reports are handled ahead of everything else.