About Baseline
What this publication is for, what it will not do, and who writes it.
Baseline reports on preventive medicine: the tests, the programmes, the evidence behind them and the prices attached to them. We publish in English, and most of what we cover is the European market.
Why this exists
Preventive screening has become a consumer market faster than it has become a settled field. A person can now buy a whole-body MRI, a 200-marker blood panel, a liquid biopsy and an epigenetic age estimate in a single afternoon, at prices ranging across two orders of magnitude, with almost no independent information about which of those things has evidence behind it and which is an expensive way to generate anxiety.
The two available sources of guidance are both compromised. Providers have an obvious interest. Medical guidelines are careful and slow, which is correct for guidelines and unhelpful for someone deciding what to do this month. We are trying to occupy the space between: faster than a guideline, more sceptical than a brochure, and explicit about uncertainty rather than smoothing it over.
What we do
- Evidence. Graded appraisals of individual tests and interventions, with a stated threshold for changing the grade.
- The Index. A sourced, dated record of what providers offer and charge, updated quarterly, published as a table and as JSON.
- Reporting. The industry as a business: models, incentives, money, regulation.
- Claim Check. Specific marketing claims, checked, with a verdict and a route to overturning it.
What we will not do
We do not recommend clinics, rank providers, or tell you what to buy. Not out of caution. Those outputs are where every comparison site in health eventually goes wrong. A ranking compresses incompatible things into one axis and then gets quoted as if the axis were real. We would rather publish the inputs and let you weight them.
We also do not practise medicine. Nothing here is a diagnosis or a recommendation for you specifically, and no article can account for your history. Take a decision with a clinician who has examined you.
Who writes it
Baseline is written and edited by its editorial staff and published under a staff byline rather than individual names. Evidence assessments are checked against the primary literature cited in each article, and every figure we publish carries the date it was verified.
We prefer the collective byline because the work is collective: an evidence grade reflects a reading of a literature rather than one person's opinion, and the references at the foot of every article are there so you can check the reading yourself. Where an article rests on a judgement that a reasonable specialist would dispute, we say so in the article.
Correspondence, including disagreement, reaches the editors at editor@baseline-media.com.
How we are funded
Baseline takes no advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate commission and no payment for inclusion in the Index. We accept nothing from any clinic or diagnostics company, including press trips, hospitality and free testing. Where we need to know what a programme is like from the inside, we pay for it and say what we paid.
Our shareholding, our editorial independence policy and the full list of what we refuse are set out on the independence and funding page.
Contact
editor@baseline-media.com for corrections, challenges, and providers who think a figure in the Index is wrong. Legal and company details are in the imprint.