There is a line running through GMedAC, and most of what is confusing about the product becomes clear once you can see where it is.
On one side sits the administration around an appointment: finding somebody, checking their credentials, seeing when they are free, booking, paying, being reminded, and booking again. On the other sits the appointment itself — what is discussed, what is decided, what is recommended, and everything that follows.
GMedAC is on the first side only.
What that means concretely
The consultation does not happen on GMedAC. There is no video call here, no messaging, no waiting room. The professional and the patient agree a channel between themselves — in person, or over whatever service they both use — and the platform is not in it.
Nothing clinical is stored. No diagnosis, no notes, no prescription, no record of what was discussed. This is not a policy that could be relaxed by a settings change: the database schema has no column for any of it, a lint rule refuses the vocabulary in source code, and a schema test fails the build if such a column appears. Three independent mechanisms, because a rule with one enforcement point is a rule with one place to be forgotten.
The professional decides everything clinical. Whether to accept a patient at all, what the appointment contains, how long it runs, what follows from it. A booking request is a request, not an instruction, and a design that made declining costly enough to stop being a real choice would break the thing the whole arrangement rests on.
Why "verified" means less than it sounds like
A verification badge means somebody checked a document, on a particular day.
It is not permission to practise. It is not an endorsement. It is not a judgement about how good anybody is at their work, and it could not be — nobody at GMedAC watched them work.
The clearest illustration is one the platform's own engineering makes
unavoidable. A fully verified professional asked about a patient in a country
where GMedAC holds no validated rule gets the answer UNKNOWN, and UNKNOWN is
not bookable. The function that decides eligibility has nowhere to accept a
verification status as an argument, which is the point: the tempting shortcut is
to skip the check for somebody already verified, and the shape of the code makes
that shortcut unavailable.
UNKNOWN means the platform holds no validated rule for that combination. It is
not a finding about anybody's licence, and it must never be read as one.
Where all of this currently stands
Nowhere, publicly. GMedAC has not launched. It has researched one corridor — Czechia — and closed none of the questions that research raised: three await a qualified lawyer, seven turn on questions research cannot answer, and two record that the evidence sought could not be found.
Two of that document's own cautions are worth carrying away, because they are the ones easiest to misread. Evidence not found is not the same as no restriction existing. And a topic excluded from research was not thereby permitted — it was not looked at.
Until a corridor's questions are answered by somebody qualified to answer them,
the platform's designed behaviour is to refuse. Every eligibility evaluation
returns UNKNOWN, and nothing is bookable. That is the system working, not the
system broken.