About Us: Meet the NCOA Adviser Reviews Team

How we make money

While we may make a commission from the links in our stories, brands cannot pay us to be featured in our content—and the editorial team is not influenced by others when deciding which products we recommend. Our research and development and editorial teams work hand in hand to highlight products and services that shined in our testing, but we also write about the brands that performed poorly to warn our readers about bad actors. What you get are honest reviews that we proudly stand behind, and the commissions we make help to fund further research and testing.

Our testing process

We approach every story with our readers in mind. When we begin to research a product or service, we collect a wide variety of information, including published studies in peer-reviewed journals, relevant reviews, expert consultations, and more. We then conduct surveys of real consumers to understand their user journey. We use the results of our surveys to design custom scoring that reflects the needs of these consumers and allows us to objectively evaluate each of the brands we cover.

It is most important to us that we see things through the eyes of our readers, so we conduct hands-on tests of the products and services we write about and coordinate focus groups to add to our first-person insights. We put brand claims under the microscope, analyzing the service range of medical alert systems to the exact number of feet, for example, and submerging hearing aids in dunk tanks to see if the brands’ water resistance claims are accurate.

Throughout our process, we conduct interviews with experts in the field and stay up to date with scientific studies and industry regulations. We believe our work here is never done, and we continue to add to our research and insights, so that we’re always the best resource for our readers.

We’ve investigated brands that are household names and those that have just entered the market. Doing this, we’ve found products and services that we highly recommend—but we’ve also uncovered products that don’t work as they should, services that have predatory contractual practices, and even outright scams. Our team takes this responsibility seriously, and we don’t hold back when something in the testing queue has raised a red flag.

Our editorial process

After our content is written by health writers who are subject matter experts in their fields, it is reviewed by our team of experienced editors. The stories are then sent to fact-checkers for review before they are scrutinized by a medical reviewer from our review board. Another member of the editorial team then edits stories for a second time. 

Next, the article is built and reviewed again by an editor and a subject matter expert. If you’ve lost count, that’s nearly a dozen different people who review our content before it reaches you.

Our writers and editors

Our roster of writers includes registered dietitians, mental health advocates, physical therapists, nurses, lawyers, and a doctor of natural medicine. They are, first and foremost, protective of our readers’ time, health, and well-being. Our writers put our audience first in everything they do.

With a combined 65.5 years of experience, our editors carefully comb through each piece of content to bring only the best, most helpful stories to life for our readers. We pore over each story, editing meticulously for accuracy.

About our medical review board

Every story we write is evaluated by a member of our medical review board who specializes in the area they oversee. We work closely with our medical reviewers to make sure our stories are medically factual and include the most current research.

Our team loves hearing from you, so please email us at reviewsteam@ncoa.org.