How we review, and how vendors can respond

Independence

The Institute accepts no vendor sponsorship, holds no vendor equity and takes no referral fees. No vendor can pay to be reviewed, to be reviewed sooner, to be reviewed favourably, or to be left out. There is no advertising on these pages and there will not be.

If any of that ever stops being true, this section closes rather than carries a disclosure.

One connection to declare now, before anyone asks it as a question: the Institute sells governance software — HAI-OS, a registry, drift-enforcement and audit platform licensed to health systems. HAI-OS is not a clinical AI product, is not among the products these pages will review, and no review outcome affects a platform sale in either direction. A vendor scored here gains nothing by buying our software and loses nothing by declining to.

Any personal or commercial connection between the Institute and a vendor under review is declared at the top of that review, before the score, on the free page.

What we do and do not do

We assess public evidence. We do not test, trial, pilot or benchmark products, and we never present our assessment as having done so.

We make no clinical, safety, regulatory or outcome claim about any named product. Where a vendor makes such a claim, we describe the claim, cite where they made it, and score the evidence offered for it.

Every point above zero carries a named, dated, public source.

The fact-check window

Before publication a vendor receives the full scorecard, every dimension, every source we relied on, and the draft narrative, with 48 hours to respond. We ask about factual accuracy only, and we say so in writing.

We correct facts. We do not soften accurate language, remove accurate findings, or delay publication because a vendor is unhappy with what the public record shows.

If a vendor supplies evidence we had not found, we score it. If that changes the number, the number changes and the published review says the vendor supplied it. That is not a concession, it is the method working.

We do not agree to off-the-record conditions, embargoes or pre-publication approval. A vendor who will speak only on those terms is recorded as having declined.

Right of reply

Any vendor may submit a response at any time after publication. We publish it alongside the review, in full, edited only for length above 400 words and for anything defamatory about a third party. We do not require it to be polite.

Corrections

Errors are corrected within one working day of being established. Every correction appears on the page with a dated note describing what changed, is logged publicly, and is carried in the next issue of the newsletter.

We never silently edit a published score. If a score changes, the old score, the new score and the reason all stay visible.

Re-scoring

Every review is re-scored at least every six months, and immediately on a material event: a clearance or withdrawal, a breach, an acquisition, a pricing change or a major model release. Every page carries its last-reviewed date, so nobody relies on a stale number without being told it is stale.

Sourcing

We rely on regulatory databases and filings, peer-reviewed literature, preprints labelled as such, the vendor's own published materials, published security attestations, public contracts and pricing, and public regulatory or court actions.

We do not score on anonymous claims, private customer anecdotes, unattributable screenshots, competitor briefings, anything under NDA, or anything told to us in confidence. We do not use another analyst's score as evidence, though we may note that it exists.

If you believe something here is wrong

Email [email protected] with the page, the specific sentence, and what you say the correct position is, with a source. We respond within two working days and correct established errors within one working day of establishing them.

This route is open to anyone, it is free, and you do not need to be the vendor to use it. We would rather fix an error than argue about one, and most disputes start because somebody could not find a way to be heard.

What a finding is

Every finding is a statement about what was published, and what was not, on a stated date, having looked in stated places. It is not a statement of fact about a product's performance, safety or compliance, and it is not a recommendation to buy or to avoid anything.

"None located" means we did not find it. It does not mean it does not exist. If something is published somewhere we did not look, tell us and the page is corrected within one working day, with the change logged.

That is why the method was published before the first review, why every finding carries a dated source, and why we write "not located as of" rather than drawing the conclusion for you.

Advisory work

If the Institute ever takes advisory work with a vendor in this library, that vendor's review is frozen at its current score, the engagement is declared on the review page, and no further scoring of that vendor happens while it runs or for twelve months afterwards.

What is published, and what is not

Every review page carries the finding for all six dimensions, in words, with the source and the date beside each one, and it stays free and indexable. Nobody has to pay to find out what a vendor has and has not published.

We do not publish a composite number or an overall grade. Each finding is a statement you can check for yourself in a few minutes, and correct us on if we are wrong. A composite is a judgement produced by weighting those findings, and it is the one thing on the page that cannot be checked, only disputed. The method sets out the scale in full so you can see what standard each finding was held to.

If that ever changes, this page and the method page will say so on the day it changes, and the change will be dated.