How it works
Methodology
Open Health Tourism verifies one thing: presence of a matched establishment in the latest successfully processed official authorization register. It does not independently verify that a physical certificate exists, and it does not assess clinical quality.
From source to result
Official documents are discovered, fetched, hashed and archived privately, then their tables are extracted, normalized and validated before any result is published. Raw source values (name, province, facility type, address, phone) are always preserved exactly as printed. A snapshot that fails validation cannot silently replace live data.
Result statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| LISTED_CURRENT | A high-confidence matched record exists in the current official snapshot. |
| POSSIBLE_MATCH | A plausible record exists, but identity evidence is incomplete. |
| AMBIGUOUS_MATCH | More than one plausible official record exists. |
| NOT_FOUND_CURRENT | No sufficiently strong match was found in the current snapshot. |
| HISTORICALLY_LISTED | A match existed in a previous snapshot but not the current one. |
| REMOVED_FROM_CURRENT_SOURCE | A previously observed record disappeared from the current source. This does not mean “revoked” unless the authority states that. |
| SOURCE_UNAVAILABLE | The current official source could not be retrieved or validated. |
| SOURCE_CHANGED_UNPARSED | The source changed structurally and could not be parsed safely. |
| COVERAGE_UNAVAILABLE | The jurisdiction or category has no legally usable public source. |
| MANUAL_REVIEW | Automated processing cannot issue a reliable result. |
VALID, INVALID, ACTIVE_CERTIFICATE and REVOKED are never used unless the official source explicitly publishes those states.
Confidence is about identity, not authorization
Match confidence describes how strongly a query matches an official record — it is separate from authorization quality.
- HIGH — exact/near-exact official name, same province, and a corroborating phone or address. Only HIGH auto-produces
LISTED_CURRENT. - MEDIUM — an alias/brand match with one corroborating identifier. Produces
POSSIBLE_MATCH. - LOW — name similarity only. Remains a search candidate and is never shown as authorized.
- NONE — no plausible candidate.
Limitations
A no-match is not proof that an organization is unauthorized. Commercial and licensed names may differ, records change between snapshots, and a source may be incomplete or temporarily unavailable. A record disappearing from a list is reported as REMOVED_FROM_CURRENT_SOURCE, never as a “revocation”, unless the authority states so.
The official source does not publish certificate numbers, issue/expiry dates, suspension or revocation status, legal entity numbers, websites or coordinates. Open Health Tourism does not invent those fields.