The Media Rating Council has accredited CheckedUp for Point of Care Digital Advertising, only the second such accreditation the council has granted and a signal that independent measurement audits are extending into a healthcare advertising channel that has long operated outside them.

The accreditation, which CheckedUp received for its ad delivery reporting methodology on June 10, 2026, is the second the MRC has issued for Point of Care Digital Advertising. It follows the accreditation of PatientPoint in 2024. According to the Media Rating Council, the CheckedUp accreditation covers a specialty point of care education platform, and it establishes a small but growing category of independently audited measurement within a media environment that pharmaceutical brands and their agencies increasingly buy into.

What point of care accreditation involves

Point of care, or POC, advertising places educational and promotional content in the physical settings where patients and clinicians meet: waiting rooms, exam rooms, pharmacy counters, and, increasingly, the electronic health record systems that sit inside clinical workflows. Waiting room screens play video. Wallboards and tablets carry brand messages. The channel reaches two distinct audiences, patients and healthcare professionals, often in the same location.

Measuring delivery in that environment is not the same as measuring a display impression on a web page. The MRC's approach reflects the difference. According to the Media Rating Council, POC measurement providers undergo the accreditation process as overseen by the council's Out of Home and Digital committees. That dual oversight matters, because a waiting room television is closer to an out of home screen than to a browser, yet the reporting that surrounds it behaves like digital measurement.

The council has built a supplemental audit layer specifically for the POC market. According to the Media Rating Council, its auditing of POC measurement providers includes procedures common to most or all of its auditing of digital measurement providers, plus additional steps designed for point of care. Those additional steps are physical. Auditors perform field work, visiting healthcare provider locations within a network to confirm the availability and functioning of the video devices on which the measured advertising appears. They also validate the classification of the device and the specialty of the healthcare provider location.

That field work is the distinguishing feature. In digital display or connected television measurement, an auditor examines code, server logs, filtration procedures, and reporting systems. For point of care, that examination still happens, but it is joined by people walking into clinics to check that the screens counted in a report are real, installed, working, and correctly categorized. The physical presence of a device in a specialist's office is treated as a fact to be verified rather than assumed.

Why the setting demands extra scrutiny

The rationale is tied to the nature of the channel. According to the Media Rating Council, the highly regulated and sensitive environment of POC advertising means independent validation helps provide assurance to users of the measurement. Pharmaceutical advertising sits under regulatory constraints that most consumer categories never encounter, and the messages delivered in a clinical setting can influence treatment decisions at the moment they are being made. A media buyer committing budget to a waiting room network wants confidence that the reported reach corresponds to devices that exist and function in the locations claimed.

The MRC has also drawn on standards developed for a related channel. According to the Media Rating Council, its POC audits apply elements of its Out of Home Measurement Standards where applicable, and the council is working with the POC industry to take further steps to ensure those standards map to specialized point of care use cases. That work signals that the framework is still being adapted rather than simply borrowed wholesale from out of home.

The scope of the CheckedUp accreditation

CheckedUp's accreditation covers its ad delivery reporting methodology, specifically two metrics: TV Video Ad Plays and Explorer Waiting Room TV Engagement across its point of care network. Neither metric had previously carried third-party MRC validation. The audit that produced the accreditation was conducted by an independent certified public accounting firm engaged directly by the MRC rather than by CheckedUp, an arrangement that preserves the independence of the review.

CheckedUp's Explorer Waiting Room TV product consists of company-managed television displays installed in point of care healthcare locations across the United States, positioned primarily in patient waiting rooms. The accreditation validates the Proof of Play Report, which confirms the number of healthcare provider locations where campaign ads were played, the total number of ad plays at each location, and counts of the healthcare professionals practicing at each location.

The methodology draws a deliberate line between installed devices and ad-delivering devices. A screen can be active in the network without having played a specific campaign asset, and the reporting reflects that distinction to prevent overcounting. It is precisely the kind of operational detail that a field audit exists to confirm, since the count on a report is only as trustworthy as the physical inventory behind it.

Two accreditations, one emerging category

The 2024 PatientPoint accreditation and the 2026 CheckedUp accreditation together define what the MRC treats as Point of Care Digital Advertising. Two accredited providers do not make a mature market, but the pairing matters because it establishes a repeatable audit framework for a channel that previously lacked one.

Point of care measurement had historically relied on proprietary verification systems built by the networks themselves or on certifications issued by industry trade bodies. CheckedUp was among the first companies to have all its product lines certified under the Point of Care Marketing Association's updated Verification and Validation guidelines in 2021. MRC accreditation is a different order of validation. It applies the same independent audit standard used across digital display, connected television viewability, and programmatic inventory to a niche healthcare environment, and it subjects the result to the annual re-audit that MRC accreditation requires to remain in force.

The distinction between a trade body certification and an MRC accreditation is the presence of the independent CPA audit and the continuing obligation attached to it. Accreditation is voluntary, but once granted it is not permanent. The service must undergo an annual audit to keep it. That ongoing requirement is what separates a one-time stamp from a sustained commitment to a measurement standard.

Where POC sits in the wider measurement landscape

The MRC's digital accreditation roster illustrates how far removed point of care has been from the mainstream of audited measurement. On the digital side, the council lists accredited services from providers such as DoubleVerify, whose Quality Analytics Platform carries accreditation across desktop, mobile web, mobile in-app, and connected TV environments, and Integral Ad Science, accredited for desktop and mobile web. Adform holds accreditation for rendered ad impressions across display and video in desktop, mobile web, mobile in-app, and connected TV, while Adloox carries accreditation for tracked display ads. These are the metrics, rendered impressions, viewable impressions, viewability, and invalid traffic detection, that have been subject to MRC standards for years in digital media.

Point of care has been absent from that world. The channel's screens do not fit neatly into the impression-and-viewability model that governs web and app measurement, and its physical inventory cannot be audited from a server. The supplemental field procedures the MRC has built are the bridge between an established audit discipline and a media type that resisted it.

The timing coincides with rising commercial stakes. Point of care ad spend in pharma topped one billion dollars for the first time in a recent year and reached approximately 1.2 billion dollars in 2025, according to preliminary data from Point of Care Marketing Association members, with sales growing an average of 22 percent annually since 2019. As budgets rise, the pressure for independently verifiable delivery figures rises with them.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For media buyers placing pharmaceutical budgets, the significance is concrete. Networks can produce their own reach and frequency figures, but without a third-party audit those numbers remain unverifiable from the outside. An MRC accreditation changes the evaluation. Once a network's methodology carries the certification, its delivery reports can be assessed against a known audit standard, the same standard applied when reviewing impression counts from an accredited demand-side platform or viewability figures from an accredited verification vendor.

The move also fits a broader pattern of measurement and verification infrastructure being built out for healthcare advertising. Pharmaceutical and healthcare marketers have been investing in deterministic targeting and compliant measurement across adjacent channels. StackAdapt introduced in-platform National Provider Identifier targeting and measurement on January 6, 2026, giving pharmaceutical marketers deterministic healthcare professional campaigns with impression-level reporting. DeepIntent connected its platform to electronic health record environments through three point of care partnerships in May 2026, extending programmatic infrastructure into clinical workflow inventory.

Regulatory pressure on the sector has intensified in parallel. Google broke its own ban on ads in AI Mode for healthcare queries with a small United States test in mid 2026, having previously classified healthcare as a sensitive vertical alongside finance and gambling. The measurement question and the access question are converging on the same market at the same time, and independent audit standards are one of the mechanisms through which a fragmented, historically opaque channel becomes legible to the buyers and regulators paying closer attention to it.

Point of care accreditation is not the largest development in advertising measurement, and two accredited providers represent a category in its earliest stage. But the extension of independent CPA audits, complete with auditors physically confirming that clinic screens exist and function, into a channel that operated for years on proprietary reporting is a marker of how the discipline of audited measurement continues to expand into media types that once sat beyond its reach.

Timeline

  • 1963: Media Rating Council established as a non-profit industry association for media measurement standards and audits.
  • 2021: CheckedUp among the first companies to have all product lines certified under the Point of Care Marketing Association's updated Verification and Validation guidelines.
  • 2024: MRC grants its first Point of Care Digital Advertising accreditation, to PatientPoint.
  • 2025: Point of care pharma ad spend reaches approximately 1.2 billion dollars.
  • June 10, 2026: CheckedUp receives MRC accreditation for TV Video Ad Plays and Explorer Waiting Room TV Engagement, the second POC Digital Advertising accreditation.

Summary

Who: The Media Rating Council, an independent United States non-profit that audits and accredits media measurement, granted accreditation to CheckedUp, a specialty point of care education platform.

What: MRC accreditation for Point of Care Digital Advertising, the council's second such accreditation, covering CheckedUp's ad delivery reporting methodology for TV Video Ad Plays and Explorer Waiting Room TV Engagement. The audit was performed by an independent CPA firm and included field work in which auditors physically visited healthcare locations to confirm device availability, function, classification, and provider specialty.

When: CheckedUp received the accreditation on June 10, 2026. It follows the first POC Digital Advertising accreditation, granted to PatientPoint in 2024.

Where: The measured advertising runs on video devices in point of care healthcare provider locations across the United States, primarily patient waiting rooms.

Why: Point of care advertising has grown into a channel where pharmaceutical spend reached roughly 1.2 billion dollars in 2025, yet it has historically lacked independent, audited measurement. Given the regulated and sensitive clinical environment, the MRC has built supplemental audit procedures, including physical field visits, to give buyers assurance that reported delivery corresponds to real, functioning devices in the locations claimed.