Methodology
How we build and maintain the UAE Open Healthcare Directory, the professionals index, and the curated insurance / specialty / area landing pages.
1. Provider records and the source of truth
Every 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 facility only enters the directory if it appears in one of these sources. We publish the licence number on the provider page wherever the issuing authority allows it. We do not buy facility lists from third parties, and we do not generate facilities from Google Places — Google Places is used only for optional enrichment (rating count, gallery photos, opening hours, the Maps URI).
2. Professionals index (DHA Sheryan)
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 We do not publish a doctor photo unless the professional has explicitly consented to it; otherwise we use a neutral initials avatar generated server-side.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. Refresh schedule and provenance
The full provider table is refreshed against the source registers on a periodic schedule. Each provider row carries a google_fetched_at timestamp (last enrichment from Google Places) and a verification date that surfaces on the public profile. Facilities that disappear from the source register are flagged for review and removed from the indexable sitemap on the next build. We track every refresh in our internal change log; when a refresh introduces a structural change to provider data, we publish a note in our editorial update history.
4. The facet policy engine
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.
5. Insurance plan acceptance
We do not currently maintain a real-time insurance acceptance graph between providers and payers — that requires either an agreement with each payer or a verifiable provider-side update loop, neither of which exists today. Until that infrastructure ships, the insurance pages on Zavis are based on (a) the legacy insurance jsonb column on the providers table (last seeded from public network lists) and (b) the geographic gating rules in the facet policy engine (Thiqa is never indexed outside Abu Dhabi, Daman Enhanced is indexed only when there are at least five providers in the city × specialty cell, etc). We do not claim a facility accepts a plan we cannot verify.
6. Ratings and reviews
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. 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. Bilingual coverage
Every directory hub page, provider profile, area page, insurance page and Intelligence article has a parallel Arabic mirror at /ar/.... Hreflang alternates link the two locales together so search engines can serve the right language to the right user. Provider names, address strings and editorial copy are translated where the source data allows; machine translation is never used as a substitute for human-reviewed Arabic on landing pages.
8. Editorial review and corrections
Intelligence articles classified as clinical or YMYL are reviewed by a named external expert before publication, and the reviewer's name + credentials appear on the byline with a link to the reviewer's Zavis profile. The article's dateModified only moves forward when a human re-reads the piece — we never rewrite timestamps for SEO purposes. To request a correction, see our corrections policy. Read the full editorial standards at /editorial-policy.