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How the ranking works

MediHub101 publishes the 101 best-reviewed providers in each category in Bangkok. The order is decided by one formula applied to every clinic in the same way, and nothing else. No clinic can pay for a place, improve its position, or have itself removed.

The problem with star ratings

A clinic showing 5.0★ from eight reviews is not better than one showing 4.7★ from three thousand. It is simply less measured. Sorting by rating alone puts the least-known clinics at the top of every list, which is the opposite of useful when you are choosing somewhere to have a medical procedure in a city you may not live in.

The score

Each clinic is scored with a Bayesian shrinkage estimator. It starts every clinic at the category average and lets it move away from that average only as far as its review volume justifies:

score = (v / (v + m)) × R + (m / (v + m)) × C

R
— the clinic’s own Google rating.
v
— how many Google reviews it has.
C
— the average rating across every clinic in the category, computed fresh on each run.
m
— the confidence weight, currently 150. At exactly 150reviews, a clinic’s own rating and the category average carry equal weight. Below that, the average dominates; above it, the clinic’s own record does.

The floors

Before any scoring, a clinic must have at least 50 reviews and at least 4.0★. A clinic that fails either is not ranked low — it is absent. There is not enough public evidence about it to place it at all.

The ceiling at 4.9★

This is the least obvious rule and the most important one. In Bangkok’s aesthetic market, a perfect score is not rare: in the first full sweep, 266 clinics showed exactly 5.0★ with more than 50 reviews — more than a list of 101 can hold. Ranking on the raw number filled the entire list with 5.0s and pushed out the three most-reviewed clinics in the city, each sitting at 4.9★ with thousands of reviews.

Two things follow. Google publishes ratings rounded to one decimal, so 4.9 and 5.0 are a single rounding step apart — treating that gap as decisive reads more precision out of the number than it contains. And a true 5.0 sustained across thousands of patients would mean nobody was ever dissatisfied, which for elective medical work is not a quality signal so much as a sign that the review set is not a random sample.

So above 4.9★ we stop distinguishing. Everything at 4.9 and above is scored as 4.9, and the weight of evidence decides the order among them. Nobody is penalised and nobody is accused of anything — a perfect score simply stops buying rank the evidence cannot support. The rating you see on a clinic’s page is always the real Google number, untouched.

At most 2 branches per brand

Chains run many branches, each with its own Google listing and its own reviews. Left alone, one chain took seventeen of 101 places. A list like that is a ranking of chains, not a way to discover a clinic — so no brand may hold more than 2 places. When a third branch would qualify, its slot passes to the next clinic down, and ranks stay contiguous.

What counts as a clinic

Google’s own category labels are unreliable in both directions — hair salons are filed as beauty clinics and genuine clinics are filed as doctors. Each candidate is therefore checked against the category it is being ranked in before it is scored, and anything in a different business entirely is dropped rather than ranked badly.

Where the data comes from

Ratings, review counts, addresses and contact details come from Google, via the Places API, and are shown exactly as Google reports them. MediHub101 is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google. We deliberately do not store or republish the text of anyone’s review — the rating and the count are the signal we rank on, and the reviews themselves belong on Google, where every clinic page links to them.

The full list is recomputed on a schedule. Clinics move up and down between runs as their review counts change, and the date of the run that produced the current list is printed at the top of every ranked page.

Coverage, honestly

A ranking is only as good as the set it ranked. Our sweep works through a fixed list of search terms across ten districts of Bangkok, and a list is published for a category only once that sweep has been completed — never from a partial pass, which would rank whatever we happened to find first. Where a published list holds fewer than 101 clinics, the page says so rather than padding it.

Ranked, not verified

This is a measurement of public review evidence. It is not an inspection, an accreditation, or medical advice. MediHub101 does not visit clinics, check licences, or vouch for anyone’s clinical outcomes, and a high rank is not a recommendation to have a procedure. Check a clinic’s credentials, and your doctor’s, before you book anything.

What is ranked