How to Commission Medical Review for Health Content

If you publish health content, sooner or later someone tells you it needs medical review — a compliance lead, a search consultant, a nervous moment after a complaint. The advice is sound. The execution is where it usually goes wrong, because "get a doctor to look at it" is not a process, and treating it as one produces exactly the hollow review that gives the whole practice a bad name.

This is a practical guide to commissioning medical review properly, written for the person doing the commissioning. It is deliberately neutral: it will not tell you who to use, because the point is to equip you to judge that yourself. Done well, commissioning is a small set of deliberate decisions. Done badly, it is a logo bought to decorate content nobody really checked.

When does health content actually need review?

Not all of it does, and pretending otherwise wastes budget and dilutes the signal. The honest test is consequence: could a reader act on this and come to harm, or make a decision involving real money or risk, if it were wrong?

Content that clears the bar for review includes anything about medicines (doses, side effects, interactions, who should not take them), anything describing symptoms and what they might mean, anything touching diagnosis, treatment choices, pregnancy, children, mental health crises, or chronic-condition management. Content that usually does not need clinical review — though it still needs editing — includes general wellbeing, lifestyle and motivational material that makes no clinical claims.

The mistake in both directions is common: publishers review fluffy listicles for show while pushing genuinely risky medication content through on a deadline. Spend the review where the consequence is.

Matching the reviewer to the content

This is the decision that most determines whether the review is real, and the one most often got wrong. "Medically qualified" is not a single competence. A reviewer's background changes what they will and won't see.

Medication and pharmacology content needs a pharmacology-literate reviewer — someone fluent in interactions, contraindications, the licensed-versus-off-label distinction, and the gap between a drug's trial population and the reader. A generalist may be perfectly competent and still miss the interaction that lands people in hospital, simply because it is not where their attention has been trained.

Content about acute symptoms and "should I worry about this" questions benefits from a reviewer with frontline experience — someone who has seen which presentations go wrong and how people misjudge their own risk. Content in a specialist area — dermatology, mental health, women's health — is best matched to that specialty, or at least to a reviewer honest enough to decline what sits outside their competence.

The single best signal of a good reviewer is one who turns work down. A clinician who says "this is dense cardiology and I'm not the right person" is demonstrating exactly the judgement you are paying for.

How to brief a reviewer properly

Most poor reviews are caused not by poor reviewers but by absent briefs. "Have a look at this and let us know if it's okay" invites the shallowest possible read. A proper brief tells the reviewer what you actually want certified.

A good brief states the audience and jurisdiction (UK readers and UK guidance are not US readers and US guidance), the intended use of the content, and — crucially — the scope you want covered: accuracy, safety-netting, currency against guidelines, regulatory compliance for medicines, or all of these. It gives the reviewer authority to require changes, not merely to comment, and makes clear that "this cannot be made safe, hold it" is a welcome answer. It allows realistic time; a meaningful review of medication content is not an eleven-minute task. And it asks for the reasoning, not just a verdict.

Brief for the review you want. Reviewers, like everyone, deliver to the spec they are given.

What good review output looks like

You can judge a review by its output even if you cannot judge the medicine yourself. Good output is specific, reasoned and a little uncomfortable.

It identifies particular claims, by quotation, and says what is wrong with each and how to fix it — not "looks fine" or a vague "tighten the safety information". It distinguishes must-fix safety issues from optional improvements, so you know what is non-negotiable. It adds things: named side effects where there were none, a denominator where a bare percentage sat, a safety-netting line, a population caveat. It flags what it could not verify and what it is uncertain about. And it occasionally tells you something you did not want to hear — that the piece needs reworking, or should not run as framed.

A review that comes back clean on the first pass of genuinely risky content is not reassuring. It is a flag. Real engagement with real medication content almost always surfaces something.

Red flags of rubber-stamp services

Some services exist to supply the badge, not the scrutiny. The warning signs are consistent:

• Volume that defies attention — a single named clinician credited across hundreds of pieces, far more than anyone could meaningfully review.
• A generic "our medical team" with no named, lookup-able individual you can match to the content.
• No requested brief and no questions asked — a service that wants only the text and returns only a tick has reviewed nothing.
• Verdicts without reasoning — "reviewed and approved" with no specifics, no edits, no flagged uncertainties.
• No authority to hold a piece — if the reviewer can only comment and never block, you have bought a signature.
• A price and turnaround that make real review impossible — meaningful clinical review of risky content takes time, and time has a floor.

None of these alone proves bad faith. Several together mean you are buying decoration.

Practical takeaways

• Commission review where the consequence is real — medicines, symptoms, diagnosis, vulnerable populations — not where it merely looks responsible.
• Match the reviewer's background to the content; pharmacology content needs a pharmacology-literate reviewer, not just any qualified clinician.
• A reviewer who declines work outside their competence is demonstrating the judgement you are paying for.
• Brief for the review you want: audience, jurisdiction, scope, the authority to require changes, and realistic time.
• Judge the output by its specificity; a clean first pass on genuinely risky content is a flag, not a reassurance.

What this doesn't mean

It doesn't mean every piece needs a forensic review, or that fast and affordable always means hollow — proportion matters, and a short low-risk explainer should not carry the cost of a medication monograph. Nor does it mean lay editing is dispensable; clarity and structure remain essential, and clinicians are often worse at them. The point is to commission deliberately, matching depth to consequence and reviewer to content.

A closing thought

The publishers who get the most from medical review are the ones who treat the reviewer as a collaborator with the power to say no, not as a vendor selling approval. The difference shows up not in the badge — those look identical — but in the content underneath it: the named side effect that made it onto the page, the overclaim that got pulled, the piece that was held until it was safe. Commissioning review well is not about buying trust. It is about earning the thing the badge is supposed to stand for.

Further reading and sources

• Patient Information Forum — PIF TICK criteria for trustworthy health information
• MHRA — Blue Guide: Advertising and Promotion of Medicines in the UK
• NICE — guidance library (the currency benchmark for UK content)
• British National Formulary (BNF) — the reference for UK dosing and interactions
• General Medical Council — Good Medical Practice (accountability and honesty in communication)
• International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) — recommendations on authorship and accountability