How Vero creates medical content

Medical review

Vero's educational health library is reviewed for medical accuracy and clarity by licensed physicians. Reviewers check that explanations reflect current clinical understanding, that claims are appropriately cautious, and that readers are directed to a clinician when individual interpretation matters. Meet the physicians and see their verified profiles on our Medical Reviewers page.

How we select references

We favor sources that are authoritative, directly relevant, and accessible to readers. The best source depends on the claim, but our general hierarchy is:

1. Government and public-health sources, including NIH, CDC, FDA, and MedlinePlus.
2. Clinical guidelines and materials from recognized medical specialty societies and professional organizations.
3. Peer-reviewed systematic reviews, consensus statements, and original research indexed by PubMed or available through PubMed Central.
4. Established academic medical centers and major health systems for clear patient-facing explanations.

References must use HTTPS, come from an approved authoritative domain, include a title and publisher, and be checked by a human before publication. We do not add sources merely to reach a quota: one high-quality canonical source can be more useful than several repetitive links.

Matching evidence to claims

Editors choose references that support the subject and material medical claims on a page, rather than relying on a source's general reputation alone. We distinguish population-level guidance from findings in a single study, preserve uncertainty, and avoid presenting association as causation. Lab ranges are described as general guidance because methods and reference intervals vary; readers should use the range printed on their own report.

Pages with references show them in a Sources section and include them in structured data. Not every page currently has an outbound reference, so missing references are flagged for editorial review rather than hidden or represented as complete sourcing.

Validation, updates, and re-review

Before the site builds, automated checks look for required page structure, valid internal links, medical hedge language, complete reference fields, HTTPS URLs, and approved citation domains. Automation can catch structural problems, but it cannot decide whether a medical claim is correct; that remains an editorial and clinical-review responsibility.

Content is re-reviewed on a recurring basis and when new evidence, guidelines, product behavior, or a reported issue could materially change an explanation. A re-review may update wording, ranges, references, cautions, or related links. The current system records a review date for the shared content set rather than maintaining a separate review date for every page.

Limitations and future improvements

• Sources are currently listed at page level. They are not yet mapped to individual sentences with claim-level footnotes.
• Review dates currently apply to the shared content set. A future migration should support page-specific reviewer assignments and review dates without implying that an untouched page was newly reviewed.
• Automated validation verifies structure and approved domains, not the truth of every claim or the quality of every study.
• Medical evidence changes, reference ranges differ, and no general article can account for a reader's symptoms, medications, history, or test conditions.