About Our Health Guide Team

We understand that each individual's healthcare journey is unique, and our goal is to empower you with quality information to make informed decisions along whatever path you take.

Our writers, editors, and experts break down complex medical topics into easily digestible guides, ensuring that you can find the information you need in a clear and accessible manner. We don’t shy away from sharing all the details, we just try to present them in a way that allows you to dive deeper, at your own pace.

We are dedicated to serving as a trusted resource for all your health-related inquiries and concerns.

Our Approach

When it comes to your health, accurate and reliable information is essential. Many medical center websites share guides that they’ve purchased from existing health libraries. At Columbia, we leverage our access to world class medical experts to create our own, original health guides and resources.

We create original educational content for two main reasons: First, given the inherent complexity of some of the topics we cover, we feel it’s important to have as many reliable explainers out there as possible. There’s no “perfect” health guide that will be clear and useful to everyone, but with enough high-quality options to choose from, there should be something for anyone. Second, by creating and owning our guides, we have the ability to constantly improve them. We’re always looking for better, clearer ways to present this material and make it more useful to readers. For feedback, contact us here.

Our Process

To ensure that our guides are both highly readable and completely up-to-date, each piece of content goes through a three step process:

Our health guides are initially written by professional writers with experience covering complex medical topics and making them understandable.
We then have their drafts reviewed by medical professionals, including doctors, surgeons, and researchers, who meticulously go through every piece of content to ensure that the information you find here is up-to-date, evidence-based, and aligned with the latest advancements in medical knowledge.
Finally, our editorial team ensures all notes are incorporated while maintaining clarity and readability

Because we are an institution that provides medical services related to many of the topics we cover, we include a “Next Steps” section at the bottom of each guide for those who may be looking to take action and could be helped by our team. These are the only places in our guides where we highlight Columbia specifically; otherwise all information presented is provider-agnostic and intended to speak objectively on these condition and treatment topics.

Our Writers

We use a mix of staff and freelance writers to produce a wide-ranging library of healthcare guides. Our writers are given a general template and format to use (to make sure they cover all key subtopics of a given subject, like “symptoms,” “diagnosis,” “treatment,” etc) but are also given room to use their own voice to explain these topics.

Some of our writers have previous healthcare experience, while others come from a more journalistic background, but all do extensive independent research when drafting their guides, even before passing them off to our expert reviewers.

Our Reviewers

Our reviewers are physicians and faculty members from NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, one of the nation’s top healthcare systems. As an academic medical center, our faculty is required to be actively engaged in all the latest studies and research.

We draw from faculty members across the medical center to make sure that any given guide is reviewed by an appropriate subject matter expert. Each article is reviewed annually.

Explore Our Guides