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Zavis

Trust & standards

Methodology

How Zavis builds the UAE Open Healthcare Directory and its professionals index. Every listing starts from a named public source and shows its source and the date its record last changed. On 11 October 2026 the directory held 26,503 facilities in six markets, and the professionals index holds 99,520 records from Dubai's medical register. Ratings come from Google and are labelled as Google ratings. The sections below answer how each part works, from provider records to corrections.

Last updated: 31 October 2026.

Every UAE healthcare facility listed on Zavis is anchored to the official licensing register for its emirate, and a UAE facility enters the directory only if it appears in one. Outside the UAE, most listings come from Google Maps business profiles: all of them in Türkiye and 65% to 91% in the Gulf markets, with the rest from regulator lists in Bahrain and Qatar and from OpenStreetMap. A listing from Google Maps is not proof of a licence. We do not buy facility lists from third parties. For UAE facilities, Google Places is used only for optional enrichment (rating count, gallery photos, opening hours, Maps URI).

1. Where does each provider record come from?

Every UAE healthcare facility listed on Zavis is anchored to an official emirate-issued register. For Dubai we use the Dubai Health Authority licensed-facility list (Sheryan), for Abu Dhabi we use the Department of Health (Tamm and the DOH licensee dataset), and for the Northern Emirates we use the Ministry of Health and Prevention (MOHAP) licensee register. A UAE facility only enters the directory if it appears in one of these sources. The March 2026 load did not keep licence numbers, so most listings show none; a licence number appears only where one has been added to the listing since. We do not buy facility lists from third parties, and we do not generate UAE facilities from Google Places — Google Places is used only for optional enrichment (rating count, gallery photos, opening hours, the Maps URI).

Outside the UAE, few markets publish a register we can use, so most listings come from public Google Maps business profiles: 91% of the active listings in Saudi Arabia, 85% in Kuwait, 77% in Qatar and 65% in Bahrain on 31 October 2026, and all of them in Türkiye. Most of the rest come from the hospital and pharmacy lists of Bahrain's regulator, the Qatar Open Data Portal and the Ministry of Public Health's facility list, and OpenStreetMap. A listing from Google Maps is a business that presents itself as a healthcare provider, not proof of a licence. The data sources page gives each source.

2. Where does the professionals index come from?

The doctor profile pages at /find-a-doctor/ are backed by the public DHA Sheryan register of licensed medical professionals — physicians, dentists, allied-health staff and nurses. We ingest the public records, match each professional to a primary facility on a soft slug match (we never claim a link we can't verify), and surface the resulting profile. Each profile carries the DHA unique ID and licence type (REG / FTL) so visitors can cross-check the original register entry. We do not publish a doctor photo unless the professional has explicitly consented to it; otherwise we use a neutral initials avatar generated server-side. We do not invent insurance acceptance, languages spoken, or "accepting new patients" status — those fields appear on a profile only when present in the source dataset.

3. 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. Each provider row carries a google_fetched_at timestamp (when its Google details were last read), and each provider page shows the date its record last changed.

4. Which filter pages can search engines index?

Healthcare directories that allow every filter combination to become an indexable URL collapse under their own crawl budget. The Zavis facet policy engine (src/lib/seo/facet-rules.ts) defines exactly which combinations of city, specialty, insurer, area and language can be crawled and indexed. The current allowlist: city + specialty, city + insurer, city + insurer + specialty (gated on minimum inventory), city + area, city + area + specialty, and city + language. Anything outside the allowlist is either not generated at all, or generated as a UX-only page with noindex,follow. We treat disciplined crawl budget as a load-bearing trust signal, not an optimisation afterthought.

The sitemap lists a city + insurer page only when at least 5 providers in our records match it, and a city + insurer + specialty page only when at least 5 match. Some long specialty lists in the largest cities also get pages 2 to 5 in the sitemap, so crawlers can reach providers past the first page.

5. How is insurance acceptance recorded?

The insurance lists on UAE listings were first filled in March 2026 by rules (facility type, city and rating), not from insurer networks. Zavis is replacing them insurer by insurer with each insurer's published UAE network list: once an insurer's list is applied, a listing carries that insurer only if it appears in the list. Most networks are run by third-party administrators, so the list is often the administrator's network that the insurer publishes. A clinic's own correction of its insurance list is kept.

  • ADNIC: ADNIC (hospital network search on adnic.ae)'s network list (read 2 November 2026), 961 listings matched, applied 2 November 2026.
  • Al Sagr National Insurance: Al Sagr National Insurance (NAS and NextCare networks)'s network list (June 2023), 809 listings matched, applied 31 October 2026.
  • Dubai National Insurance: Dubai National Insurance (NAS, NextCare, Lifeline, eCare and Aafiya networks)'s network list (2024 and 2025), 1,702 listings matched, applied 31 October 2026.
  • Fidelity United Insurance: Fidelity United Insurance (NextCare GN+ network)'s network list (August 2022), 687 listings matched, applied 31 October 2026.
  • GIG Gulf: GIG Gulf (healthcare provider locator on gig-gulf.com)'s network list (read 2 November 2026), 785 listings matched, applied 2 November 2026.
  • IRIS Health: no current UAE network (the Central Bank of the UAE cancelled the licence of IRIS Health Services LLC, Central Bank of the UAE, 6 February 2023); removed from every listing except clinic-entered lists.
  • MedNet: MedNet (network list published by RAK Insurance)'s network list (May 2025), 480 listings matched, applied 1 November 2026.
  • National General Insurance: NGI HealthNet's network list (September 2026), 1,412 listings matched, applied 31 October 2026.
  • Neuron: Neuron (network list published by RAK Insurance)'s network list (February 2025), 657 listings matched, applied 31 October 2026.
  • RAK Insurance: RAK Insurance (NAS, NAS Value, MedNet, NextCare and Neuron networks)'s network list (February 2025), 1,630 listings matched, applied 31 October 2026.
  • Sukoon (Oman Insurance): Sukoon Insurance (provider search on sukoon.com)'s network list (read 2 November 2026), 969 listings matched, applied 2 November 2026.
  • Takaful Emarat: Takaful Emarat (NAS, Nextcare, MedNet, eCare, Aafiya and Al Madallah networks)'s network list (October 2026), 2,247 listings matched, applied 2 November 2026.
  • Union Insurance: Union Insurance (NAS, NextCare, eCare and Aafiya networks)'s network list (June 2025), 1,705 listings matched, applied 31 October 2026.

For the other insurers, the lists are not yet confirmed against a network list: confirm cover with the insurer or the clinic before a visit. City and insurer pages are indexed only when enough listings match (Thiqa is never indexed outside Abu Dhabi).

6. Where do ratings and reviews come from?

Zavis displays the Google Places review count and rating average as a reference signal on provider pages, because it is one of the few independent quality signals available today. We do not currently re-publish full Google review text. Aggregate ratings are emitted in JSON-LD only when a provider has at least three reviews — below that threshold the structured data is suppressed to avoid overstated aggregateRating claims.

On the /best pages and the top 10 for the UAE, Zavis calls a provider top rated only when it has a Google rating from at least 20 reviews. It orders those providers by a weighted average that adds 150 reviews at 4.2 to each provider's own reviews, so a 5.0 from 25 reviews (weighted 4.31) ranks below a 4.6 from 2,000 reviews (4.57). The short lists of highly rated providers on city pages are sorted by Google rating, then by number of reviews.

Our own verified review system (QR / SMS-OTP intake) is not yet live; the policy page at /verified-reviews describes the design and the launch criteria.

7. Which pages have an Arabic version?

The UAE directory pages, including provider profiles, area pages and insurance pages, have Arabic versions at /ar/.... Hreflang alternates link each English page to its Arabic version so search engines can serve the right language. Intelligence articles and the Türkiye pages are in English only, and Arabic pages exist for only part of the other Gulf markets.

8. How are articles reviewed and corrected?

Zavis Intelligence pieces are drafted by AI from Zavis datasets; code checks every number against the data before publication, and each piece states its method, sources and limits. They report industry and regulatory data and never give medical advice. Any article that gives patient-facing medical guidance must be reviewed by a named external clinical reviewer whose name and credentials appear on the byline with a link to their Zavis profile. An article's dateModified only moves forward when the piece is substantively updated — we never rewrite timestamps for SEO purposes. To request a correction, see our corrections policy. Read the full editorial standards at /editorial-policy.

9. How does Zavis count the usage figures on its product pages?

Zavis reads each figure from its own production databases, read-only. Every count leaves out Zavis's own accounts, test accounts and accounts that are not clinics.

  • Clinics and branches: clinic accounts that sent or received a patient message in the last 30 days.
  • Patient messages: all messages to and from patients. Status changes and other activity entries in a conversation are not counted.
  • Message rate: the last 30 days of patient messages, given as one message every so many seconds, rounded up.
  • Phone calls: inbound and outbound calls through Zavis.
  • Appointments: appointments that Zavis booked or synced, counted only when they carry the appointment ID from the clinic's EMR.
  • Patient contacts: the patient contacts in clinic accounts.

Each figure is rounded down. For example, 39 clinics show as 35+ and 4,696,496 messages show as 4.6 million+. Zavis stores the figures in the site database and updates them without a site release. If a figure falls by more than 20%, the update is refused until the cause is known. No figure on these pages describes a single clinic.