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Kave Health

Independence policy

Every health directory says it is independent. This page says what that means here, specifically enough to be checked.

Kave accepts no payment, commission, referral fee, affiliate revenue, sponsorship, or in-kind consideration from any organisation it lists or could list.
  • Enforced by the system, not only by policy

    A promise not to take money is worth what the promiser’s incentives are worth. The stronger guarantee is that the software has no way to act on such a payment:

    • There is no column anywhere in the schema representing a commercial relationship, a sponsorship, a partner tier, or a bid.
    • The hospital ranking function takes exactly five inputs: the query, a ZIP code, a radius, a state, and a limit. Its ordering terms are match tier, match quality, and distance.
    • The matching engine scores seven published criteria and nothing else. Every point produces a sentence shown on the result card.
    • The editorial quality score is worth five points out of a hundred in matching. It breaks ties; it cannot decide a match.

    Adding paid placement would require a schema migration, a change to a published ranking function, and a change to this page. That is a deliberately high bar, and it leaves a trail.

  • Commercial companies can still be listed

    Independence means Kave is not paid — not that only charities appear. Several listings are for-profit companies, included because they clear the same four gates as everything else, usually on the strength of publishing a price before you commit. Where a listing is commercial, the record says so and states the trade-off, which is normally that you are paying cash and it will not count toward a deductible.

  • How conflicts are handled
    • A reviewer with a financial interest in an organisation does not review it. Every verification record names its reviewer.
    • Corrections from an organisation about its own listing are prioritised — but still checked against that organisation’s official documents before anything is published.
    • An organisation cannot have an unflattering limitation removed. The limitations are why the listing is trustworthy.
  • What Kave will not do
    • Sell placement, ranking, featuring, or the order of results.
    • Sell or share user data. There is no user account to attach it to.
    • Take a share of savings from any program a user reaches through Kave.
    • Rank hospitals by quality, or import the CMS star ratings.
    • Present an unreviewed policy as reviewed, or fill an unverified field with a plausible guess.

Check it yourself

The scoring criteria and weights, the matching weights, the review cadence, and the meaning of each verification label are all published on the methodology page. If a ranking on this site cannot be explained from what is written there, that is a bug — please report it.