1. What counts as a source?
A directory is only as good as the register underneath it. Zavis treats a healthcare facility as real when a government health regulator has licensed it, and treats everything else — ratings, photographs, opening hours, neighbourhood boundaries — as enrichment layered on top of that spine. The distinction matters because the two kinds of data fail differently. A regulator register goes stale. A commercial data feed goes wrong. We would rather publish a facility whose telephone number is six months old than one whose existence we cannot prove.
This page lists every input, what we take from each one, what we leave behind, and the licence we rely on. It is written to be checkable. Every source in the table below is public, and each link goes to the source itself rather than to a summary of it.
2. Which UAE registers does the directory use?
UAE facility records are anchored to three regulators, split by emirate. The Dubai Health Authority licenses facilities in Dubai and publishes them through Sheryan. The Department of Health licenses facilities in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and Al Dhafra. The Ministry of Health and Prevention licenses facilities in the five Northern Emirates: Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah. Between them, those three registers define the 12,271 UAE facilities in the index.
From each register we took the fields that identify and locate a facility: name, facility category, emirate, address and published telephone number. The March 2026 load did not keep the licence number, the licence type or the Arabic facility name, so most UAE listings show none of them. A licence number appears only where one has been added to the listing since. A missing licence number on a Zavis page means we do not have it, never that the facility is unlicensed. The Dubai professional records do not carry Arabic names, which is why Arabic practitioner names are absent from our doctor profiles. We do not transliterate them ourselves.
We leave behind everything a register publishes for internal administration: inspection notes, internal reference codes, and contact details for named individuals that the facility has not published as its public contact. A facility enters the directory only when it appears in one of these three registers. We do not buy facility lists from data brokers, and we do not create a facility record because a search engine or a map has one.
3. Where does the licensed professionals index come from?
The professionals index holds 99,520 records from Dubai's medical register: 24,186 physicians, 7,713 dentists, 34,733 nurses and 32,888 allied health staff. 69,519 of them name the facility that holds the licence; 30,000 are registered only, with no current facility licence. Each profile carries the register’s unique identifier and the licence type, so a visitor can open the register and check our entry against the original. That is the standard we hold the index to. A field that cannot be checked against the register does not belong on the profile.
Practitioners are matched to a primary facility on a conservative name match. Where the match is uncertain we publish the practitioner without a facility link, because a wrong employer is worse than a missing one. We do not publish a practitioner photograph without explicit consent; profiles without consent use a generated initials avatar. Insurance acceptance, languages spoken and availability appear only when the source dataset carries them.
4. Where do the listings outside the UAE come from?
On 11 October 2026 the index covered six markets: the UAE with 12,271 facilities, Türkiye with 10,574, Saudi Arabia with 1,775, Bahrain with 712, Kuwait with 598 and Qatar with 573. That is 26,503 facilities in total. Counts fall as well as rise, because duplicate and closed listings are merged or retired. Source quality outside the UAE is uneven, and we would rather state that here than imply a uniform standard we do not have.
We prefer a national regulator register, then a national open-data portal, then open datasets. Outside the UAE, few markets publish a register we can use, so most Gulf listings come from public Google Maps business profiles. On 31 October 2026 that was 91% of the active listings in Saudi Arabia, 85% in Kuwait, 77% in Qatar and 65% in Bahrain. Of the rest, 213 Bahrain listings come from the hospital and pharmacy lists that the National Health Regulatory Authority publishes as downloadable documents, 34 Qatar listings come from the Qatar Open Data Portal and the Ministry of Public Health’s facility list, and the remainder come from OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. All Türkiye listings come from Google Maps business profiles retrieved through the Google Places API, because we have not found a public Turkish licensed-facility download. Treat a listing that comes from Google Maps as a business that presents itself as a healthcare provider, not as proof of a licence.
Where a market’s source does not publish a licence number, the facility page does not show one. A missing licence number on a Zavis page means we do not have it, never that the facility is unlicensed.
5. How are neighbourhoods and areas assigned?
Area pages need real boundaries. Dubai’s come from Dubai Pulse, the emirate’s open-data platform, which publishes community polygons with both English and Arabic names as GeoJSON. Abu Dhabi districts and sectors come from the Abu Dhabi Open Data platform. For the Northern Emirates, where no equivalent open dataset exists, we fall back to OpenStreetMap administrative boundaries.
Holding geography separately from the facility records is what lets area pages exist without a commercial mapping dependency. Dubai Pulse and OpenStreetMap both require attribution on reuse. The OpenStreetMap contribution is licensed under the Open Database Licence, and the attribution appears on the pages built from it.
6. What comes from Google Places, and what does not?
In the UAE, Google Places supplies enrichment and nothing structural. Where a licensed facility has a Google Business Profile, we read the rating average, the review count, opening hours, photographs and the Maps URI, and attach them to the record the regulator already established. In Türkiye, and for most Gulf listings, the Google Business Profile is the listing itself (see section 4). A rating shown on a Zavis page is a Google rating and is labelled as one. We do not present it as a Zavis score, and we do not fold it into a rating of our own.
We do not republish Google review text. Aggregate ratings are emitted in structured data only once a facility has at least three reviews, because a five-star average drawn from a single review produces a misleading search result. No UAE facility exists on Zavis because Google has it: in the UAE, a Google Business Profile with no matching regulator licence does not become a listing.
7. How often is the data refreshed, and how is that shown?
Zavis pulled the UAE facility registers in the first quarter of 2026, the Gulf listings in April 2026 and the Türkiye listings in May 2026. There is no scheduled re-pull yet, so a facility that closed or lost its licence after the pull can stay listed until a correction reaches Zavis. A listing found to be closed is taken off the directory and out of the sitemap. The UAE sitemap is rebuilt every hour, and the Gulf and Türkiye sitemaps every day. Google details are read separately, and every row carries a google_fetched_at timestamp recording when they were last read. Each provider page shows the date its record last changed. Directory pages are statically rendered and revalidated every six to twelve hours, so a change written to the database reaches readers well before a search engine re-crawls the page.
The Intelligence Desk publishes on its own schedule: 247 pieces in the 30 days to 31 October 2026, and 1,158 in total. Each piece records its publication date.
8. What is left out of the index?
Not every licensed facility earns an indexable page, and the rule is mechanical rather than editorial. A facility page enters the sitemap and stays indexable only when it has at least one form of unique content — a description longer than eighty characters, or at least one photograph — and at least two of five completeness signals: a Google rating above zero, a telephone number, a website, that same description length, and a non-empty opening-hours record.
Facilities that fail the gate remain in the directory and stay findable through search and browse. They are marked noindex and held out of the sitemap until the record improves, which usually happens when the operator claims the listing and completes it. A single shared function decides both the sitemap entry and the page-level robots directive, so the two signals cannot drift apart and send Google contradictory instructions.
The same discipline governs filter pages. The facet policy engine defines which combinations of city, specialty, insurer, area and language may be crawled and indexed. Anything outside that allowlist is either never generated or generated as a browsing-only page carrying noindex,follow. The reasoning behind the allowlist is set out on our methodology page.
9. What sources do Intelligence articles use?
Editorial coverage draws on primary material: regulator circulars and dashboards, federal cabinet decisions, exchange filings, peer-reviewed literature and named on-record interviews. Clinical articles cite their sources in a numbered list at the foot of the page, with DOIs resolved through Crossref where the source has one. Authors and external reviewers who hold an ORCID iD have it shown on their profile, so a reader can check a reviewer’s publication record independently of anything we say about them. The full standard is published at /editorial-policy.
10. Where do lab test and procedure prices come from?
A price marked as published comes from the lab, clinic or hospital’s own website. Each one links to the page it was read from and shows the date it was read. Lab test prices were last read on 7 November 2026; procedure prices carry their read date on each page.
Procedure pages also show indicative ranges compiled by Zavis. They are labelled as indicative, they are not taken from a published price list and they are not quotes: each provider sets its own prices. Websites do not all say whether VAT or a collection fee is added, so the final amount is always the provider’s to confirm.
11. Where does medicine information come from?
The medicine pages cover 117 medicines in 40 drug classes. Zavis compiled the list, with generic names, brand names, prescribing status, drug class and common uses, from public pharmaceutical references in April 2026. It is not an extract of the UAE drug register, and Zavis does not hold any pharmacy’s stock.
Brand availability varies between pharmacies and emirates, so ask your pharmacist which brands are available. The pages are not medical advice: ask your doctor before you start, stop or change a medicine.
12. What does Zavis never do?
- Buy facility lists from third-party data brokers or lead vendors.
- Create a facility record from a map or search listing that has no regulator licence behind it.
- Generate, synthesise or paraphrase patient reviews. No Zavis-originated review is live on the site today; the design and launch criteria are published at /verified-reviews.
- Present a Google rating as a Zavis rating.
- Scrape commercial property portals, classified sites or competing aggregators for healthcare listings.
- Publish a practitioner photograph without that practitioner’s consent.
- Sell placement in the directory, or let a commercial relationship change where a facility appears on a hub page.