Conflicts of interest
The conflicts behind the recommendations on this site. Named, in plain English.
It is nearly impossible to provide career advice to a fellow clinician without a conflict of interest of some kind. Like in a medical presentation, the right move is to show the conflicts so you can evaluate the bias for yourself. Larch is a for-profit business. That has not changed, and probably won’t. Here is everything I’d want you to know if you were sitting in my office.
Last updated 2026-05-05. Written and signed by Jody Mitchell, MD, founder. Email me directly at jody@larchhealth.com if anything on this page is unclear or seems wrong.
How Larch makes money, plainly
Free for clinicians, paid by the partners we recommend.
The credential tracker, smart alerts, and document vault are free for clinicians forever. We never charge you to track your own license, DEA, board certification, or CME log.
We earn money when you sign up for a partner product through our links — business banking, business credit cards, malpractice insurance, payroll, EHR systems, and similar categories. The partner pays us a referral fee. You pay nothing extra; the price you get through Larch is the same price the partner offers anyone else, sometimes better.
That is the entire business model. Either enough clinicians use Larch and choose enough partner products through us, or we don’t exist. There is no “but actually” footnote. The page you’re reading is paid for by the partner referrals you may eventually consider, not by you.
The conflicts
Twelve specific conflicts to keep in mind.
Numbered for easy reference if you email me about one of them.
Partners pay us when you sign up through Larch.
This is the core conflict. If a partner pays us, we have an economic interest in your signing up with them. We try to counter that with a published methodology per category and an honest comparison — but the conflict is real, and you should know it’s there every time you click an “Apply” or “Get a quote” button.
Some partners pay us more than others.
Affiliate rates vary across partners and across product categories. We rank by methodology, not by what each partner pays — but ranking equally-good products is a judgment call, and judgment is exactly where compensation can creep in. When two products genuinely tie on our rubric and one pays us more, we will tell you they tied and let you choose.
Sponsored placements exist, and we label them.
Some partners pay for top-of-page placement or featured treatment beyond the standard affiliate relationship. When a placement is sponsored, we mark it “Sponsored” inline, the way Bankrate and NerdWallet do. The badge is right next to the listing — not in the page footer or buried in a tooltip.
I’m a working clinician with my own collaborative practice.
That’s an advantage and a conflict. The advantage: every product Larch recommends has been pressure-tested against an actual independent practice that runs across multiple states. The conflict: I have personal relationships with some vendors and probably a soft spot for products I’ve relied on. I will explicitly disclose any product I personally use or have a financial relationship with, on the partner’s listing.
I may hold equity in healthcare-adjacent companies.
Founders accumulate small stakes — advisor grants, friends-and-family rounds, the occasional angel check. If a company I hold equity in ever appears on Larch’s Recommended directory, I will disclose the ownership stake on that partner’s listing in dollars or percentage of stake, whichever is more meaningful. Today the only ventures I have equity in are my own clinical practice and Larch.
Larch Match (when it launches) earns transactional fees we set.
Larch Match will be our marketplace connecting NPs and PAs with supervising physicians. We’ll earn a fee on each collaborative practice agreement. That gives us a financial interest in matching more pairs — which can become a conflict if we ever start matching pairs that aren’t good fits. We commit to a published rubric for matches and to declining bad fits even when declining costs us revenue.
Larch competes with some of the products Larch may also list.
The credential tracker competes with a handful of paid credentialing tools. If we ever list a competing tracker on Recommended (most likely as part of an “alternatives” comparison page), the conflict is obvious. We will disclose it inline on that page.
We receive demo accounts and complimentary access from partners.
To evaluate a partner’s product, we usually need an account. Most partners provide one free. That’s standard industry practice but worth disclosing — we don’t pay for the access we use to write a review.
Editorial and business are not separate teams yet.
Larger publishers maintain a firewall between the editorial team writing reviews and the business team negotiating partner deals. Larch is small. Today, I do both. As Larch grows the firewall becomes both possible and necessary; for now, I am the firewall, and you should weigh that accordingly.
Outside investors will eventually have their own interests.
If and when Larch takes outside capital, those investors may hold stakes in partner companies. We will disclose any investor conflicts on each affected partner’s listing the same way we disclose the founder’s. Larch is currently self-funded.
We use your tracker data to make partner offers more relevant.
When you tell Larch your specialty, your states, and your renewal calendar, we use that data to surface partner offers that fit. That’s a real benefit and also a conflict: we have an incentive to put more partner offers in front of more users. We commit that the credential dashboard will not surface partner offers more often than once per dashboard view, and never inside an alert email.
Free users and paid users (in the future) get the same advice.
When Larch eventually offers a paid tier (likely Larch Match and possibly premium features), the partner recommendations and rankings on Recommended will be identical for paying and non-paying users. Paying us does not improve the advice you get; not paying us does not degrade it.
Personal disclosure
What I, personally, am holding.
I run a multi-state collaborative practice for nurse practitioners. That practice is the reason Larch exists — I built the tracker because the spreadsheets I was using lied to me twice. Specifically, as of the date on this page:
- My only ownership stakes are in The Advanced Practice Network LLC (Larch) and my own clinical practice.
- I do not currently hold equity, advisor grants, or paid advisory roles in any company that appears (or is being considered) for Larch’s Recommended directory.
- I do not accept personal compensation, gifts, or travel from any product Larch recommends. Demo accounts and complimentary access for evaluation are the only exceptions, disclosed above.
- If any of this changes, this page changes the same week.
The commitments
Eight things we will not do.
You can hold us to these. If we ever break one, email me and I’ll either fix it or update this page to remove the commitment we couldn’t keep.
- We will never publish patient testimonials.
- We will never charge clinicians for credential tracking.
- We will never sell your credential or contact data — to pharma, recruiters, or lead-gen brokers.
- We will never run banner ads inside the dashboard.
- We will never call a partner “vetted” unless we’ve actually run a documented vetting process and we’re willing to publish the criteria.
- We will never push partner offers via push notification or alert email.
- We will publish absolute affiliate revenue numbers — in dollars, by category — at least once a year, starting with our first full year of operation.
- We will tell you when something on this page is wrong, and update it the same week.
Found something off?
Tell me. I will fix it or explain it.
If a partner relationship looks misrepresented, a recommendation looks compensation-driven, or a disclosure isn’t loud enough, I want to know. Email me directly at jody@larchhealth.com. I read these.
See also: how we protect your data.