Editorial Standards

CareCostIndex publishes healthcare cost information that readers use to plan medical decisions and household budgets. Under Google’s Your-Money-Your-Life (YMYL) framework, that obligates us to document — in a single, reader-facing page — exactly how our content is produced, reviewed, corrected, and funded. This is that page.

Who writes and reviews

Every procedure overview, guide, and country page on CareCostIndex is:

1. Drafted by a named editor or contributing writer with declared credentials (see the Editor page). Where a first draft is produced with assistance from a large language model, the final published version is rewritten and fact-checked line-by-line by a human editor. We do not publish AI-generated content without editorial review.
2. Fact-checked against the primary sources listed in our methodology before publication. Cost figures must trace to either a CMS dataset, a hospital-published price-transparency file, a state All-Payer Claims Database (APCD) release, or a published industry survey with a disclosed sample size. Figures that cannot be sourced are not published.
3. Reviewed annually — and any time a federal rule change, CMS fee-schedule revision, or state APCD update materially affects a cost bucket. The reviewedDate field on each procedure is the date of the most recent review.
4. Medically reviewed for YMYL-sensitive procedures (surgery, oncology, cardiac, obstetric, and fertility pages) by a U.S.-licensed clinician where indicated. Where a Medically reviewed by byline is shown on a page, the named clinician’s credential and verification link are disclosed on the Editor page.

Source hierarchy

When figures conflict across sources, we apply the following hierarchy:

1. Primary — government datasets. CMS Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data, CMS Physician Fee Schedule, Hospital Price Transparency Machine-Readable Files (HPT MRFs), state APCD releases.
2. Secondary — payer-published benchmarks and accredited industry surveys. FAIR Health benchmarks, Genworth Cost of Care Survey, professional association fee surveys (e.g., AAD for dermatology).
3. Tertiary — peer-reviewed academic research on healthcare pricing, used only for context and never as the sole source of a published figure.

We explicitly do not use: provider marketing pages, price estimators embedded in hospital marketing sites (without cross-validation against an MRF), user-reported prices without moderation, or aggregator sites that do not disclose their own source hierarchy.

What we include, what we exclude

Published procedure costs on CareCostIndex represent the typical all-in facility-and-professional cost for a standard presentation of the procedure for an insured adult in an outpatient setting, unless the page explicitly states otherwise. We exclude: complications costs, catastrophic-case outliers above the 95th percentile, and post-discharge follow-up unless it is part of the standard bundle. Pages note the inclusion/exclusion assumptions where they materially affect interpretation.

Corrections policy

If a published figure is incorrect, we correct it. Corrections are handled as follows:

• Reader reports: email editor@carecostindex.com. We aim to acknowledge within 2 business days and resolve within 7 business days.
• Material corrections (more than 15% change to a headline cost figure) are recorded in a visible correction note at the bottom of the affected page and carry an updated reviewedDate.
• Minor corrections (typos, rounding, formatting) are applied silently but logged internally.
• Disputes: if a provider disputes a figure, we re-pull the source file and respond with a written reason within 10 business days. We do not remove or alter figures based solely on provider objection; only on new or corrected source data.

Conflict of interest

CareCostIndex is an independent publication. We do not accept:

• Payment or promotional consideration from hospitals, health systems, insurers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, device manufacturers, or digital health companies in exchange for editorial coverage, placement, or favorable framing.
• Revenue-share or affiliate commissions tied to specific provider or plan recommendations.
• Sponsored content, native advertising, or “advertorial” formats.

We display general-audience advertising served by Google AdSense. Ad units are clearly labeled “Advertisement” or “Sponsored” per AdSense policy. The editorial team has no visibility into which specific advertisers are shown on which pages, and ad-serving does not influence what we cover or how we cover it.

Where a guide or page mentions a specific commercial product or service (for example, online therapy platforms like BetterHelp or Talkspace), we disclose the relationship — or lack of one — inline. Unless otherwise noted, outbound commercial links are not affiliate links.

AI & automation policy

We use large language models as a drafting aid and as a research assistant — for example, to summarize a long CMS rule change or to produce a first pass of a procedure overview that is then rewritten by a human editor. We do not publish unedited model output. Every published page carries a human byline, and every cost figure on every page is traceable to a human-reviewed source.

We do not use AI to auto-generate location-specific prose (for example, “what it costs in Alabama” versus “in Alaska”) at scale without editorial review — a pattern that Google’s March 2024 and subsequent Core Updates explicitly target as scaled content abuse.

Translation policy

Long-form editorial content (guides, legal pages, editor/standards pages) is translated into additional languages by a human translator or with professional translation-memory tooling with editor review. Short UI strings and navigation labels use translation-memory tooling. Procedure overview prose in languages other than English is produced only after the English source has been finalized and fact-checked.

Licensing and attribution

Text and cost compilations on CareCostIndex are published under our terms of service. Underlying government data (CMS, HPT MRFs, APCD releases) is public domain or published under the originating agency’s release terms, which we respect. Where we cite proprietary survey data (for example, Genworth), we credit the source on the page and link to the publisher.

Contact

Editorial questions, corrections, source disputes, and partnership inquiries: editor@carecostindex.com or use the contact form.