Before you book anything, Elena checks the doctor’s government medical license, their training and specialty credentials, the clinic or hospital where they operate, and their public reviews and social media presence. We tell you plainly what we found, including anything we could not confirm. This research is free and doesn’t require booking a treatment. Elena is paid when you book, so you should know how that works before you read the rest of this page: see how Elena gets paid below.
Colombia already has real, public systems for checking a provider’s license (RETHUS), a plastic surgeon’s specialty membership (SCCP), a hospital’s international accreditation (JCI), and a bariatric surgeon’s association membership (ACOCIB). Almost nobody explains these clearly or checks them on a patient’s behalf. Elena does both.
What verified by Elena means
Verification is not a badge or a promise about your results.
Verified by Elena means we checked four things, and we show you the date we checked them.
- The clinic is a registered provider. It appears in REPS, Colombia’s official registry of health providers, at the address where you would be treated. Registration means the provider is in the system and has declared it meets the conditions. It is not a government inspection, and we will not describe it as one.
- The doctor is licensed. They appear in ReTHUS, Colombia’s national registry of licensed health professionals. Every doctor we name on a profile has been looked up individually, by their own ID number.
- The training is real. We read the diploma or specialty certificate the doctor gives us, and where the specialty has a professional society, we check that directory too. Society membership is voluntary in Colombia, so it is a credential, never a license.
- The public record matches. The clinic’s and the doctor’s public profiles and reviews trace back to the licensed identity, and we tell you plainly if something looks off.
Verified does not mean we judged the medicine. Elena does not rate clinical quality, does not track complication rates, does not promise a result, and cannot tell you whether a treatment is right for you. Only your doctor can do that. We also cannot tell you a doctor has a clean disciplinary history: Colombian law lets some sanctions stay private, so the most we can honestly report is that we found no public sanction.
Every verified profile shows the date of the last check. We re-run all four checks at least once a year, and sooner if something changes: a registration lapses, an insurance policy expires, or a patient tells us something we should look at. If a profile goes past that date without being re-checked, the verification comes down until we have done the work again.
Elena does this before you spend any money. If something doesn’t check out, you hear about it directly, not buried in fine print.
How Elena gets paid
Clinics pay Elena for technology and commercial services: a monthly fee and, on the plans where Elena answers patients for the clinic, a commission on the patients who book. You pay your clinic directly, and Elena never adds anything to its price. Payment does not buy verification, ranking or a medical recommendation.
That is a real financial interest, and you should weigh it when you read anything on this site that says a doctor is verified. So here is the line Elena holds: what no doctor can buy is verification. Every doctor here is checked the same way, whether they pay us a monthly fee or not. Verification is a check of the public record, and the result is the result whether or not you ever book. If a doctor doesn’t check out, we tell you, even when that means you book with no one.
REPS is the registry that says a clinic can legally operate
REPS (Registro Especial de Prestadores de Servicios de Salud) is Colombia’s official registry of health providers. Every clinic, hospital, and independent professional in the country has to be registered in it, with at least one address and at least one service, before it can treat anyone. That rule is Resolución 3100 de 2019, article 4.
One honest limit, because it changes what the registry is worth to you: registration runs on the provider’s own self-assessment, declared into REPS (article 5). A health secretary can visit, but not every registration involves a visit. So REPS tells you a provider is in the system and has declared it meets the conditions. It does not tell you an inspector walked in. Registrations also expire: four years for a first registration, then one year at a time, each renewal requiring a fresh self-assessment (article 10).
Elena checks REPS for every clinic it lists, at the address where you would be treated, and re-checks it on the schedule above.
RETHUS is Colombia’s national license registry
RETHUS (Registro Único Nacional del Talento Humano en Salud) is run by Colombia’s Ministry of Health. Being registered in it is what makes practicing legal in Colombia at all (Ley 1164 de 2007, article 18), and the same law requires the registry to record sanctions reported by the country’s health ethics tribunals (article 23). Anyone can search it for free.
You can check a name yourself through the Ministry’s public portal, but you need the professional’s ID number: the portal asks for the ID type and number, and the name fields alone will not run a search. Elena runs this same lookup for every doctor it names on a profile, using the ID number the doctor provides, and gives you the result before you book.
SCCP verifies a plastic surgeon’s specialty training
A medical license from RETHUS lets someone practice medicine in Colombia. It doesn’t by itself confirm they trained specifically as a plastic surgeon. The Sociedad Colombiana de Cirugía Plástica, Estética y Reconstructiva (SCCP) is the professional society for that specialty, and its member directory lists over 700 surgeons who completed a recognized plastic surgery residency and meet the society’s academic and ethical requirements. You can search it by city.
Elena checks SCCP membership as a second, specialty-specific layer on top of the base license, for exactly the procedures where it matters.
JCI accredits hospitals for patient safety
Joint Commission International accredits hospitals worldwide against a shared set of patient-safety and quality standards. Colombia has a small number of JCI-accredited institutions, including Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá, first accredited in 2010 and reaccredited five times since.
Facility accreditation tells you something real about the hospital’s systems: infection control, medication safety, staff training. It doesn’t tell you anything about one specific surgeon, which is why Elena checks the doctor and the facility as two separate questions, not one.
ACOCIB credentials bariatric and metabolic surgeons
For gastric sleeve, gastric bypass, and other bariatric procedures, the Asociación Colombiana de Obesidad y Cirugía Bariátrica (ACOCIB) is Colombia’s professional association for surgeons in that specialty, affiliated with the international IFSO network. Membership signals a surgeon works within that specialty’s shared training and practice standards.
How to check a doctor yourself, right now
You don’t need Elena to run these checks. Here’s the short version:
- Look up the clinic in the REPS registry to confirm it’s registered at the address where you’d be treated.
- Search the doctor’s ID number in the RETHUS public portal to confirm their license. The portal shows you what the registry holds on that person.
- For plastic surgeons, search their name in the SCCP directory to confirm specialty membership.
- Look up the hospital or clinic name to see if it appears on Colombia’s list of JCI-accredited institutions.
- For bariatric surgeons, check whether they’re listed with ACOCIB.
Elena runs the ones that apply to your doctor and their clinic, plus a check on the doctor’s public reviews and social media, and hands you the plain result before you decide anything. Steps 1 and 2 apply to everyone. Steps 3, 4, and 5 don’t: a dentist has no SCCP membership to check and most clinics are not JCI-accredited, and saying otherwise would be pretending we ran a check that doesn’t exist for them.
What Elena checks that a public registry can’t
The government registries above confirm a license exists and hasn’t been revoked. They don’t confirm that the Instagram account claiming to be Dr. Smith’s Medellín clinic is actually run by that clinic, or that five-star reviews on a lesser-known site weren’t written by the clinic itself. Elena cross-checks a doctor’s online presence against their real, licensed identity and flags anything that looks off.
Verification does not guarantee how your treatment will go. It confirms that the credentials and public record behind a doctor are real, so you’re deciding with facts instead of a marketing page.
Key takeaways
- Verified by Elena means four dated checks: REPS registration, ReTHUS license, training papers, and a public record that traces to the license.
- RETHUS is Colombia's national license registry, and you can check any doctor in it yourself, free.
- SCCP, ACOCIB, and JCI add specialty and safety layers a basic license can't show.
- Elena also checks what registries can't: that the reviews and profiles trace back to the licensed identity, and that the clinic operates at its registered address.
