Any time we bring attention to the fees that dentists, doctors and other medical professionals charge we are given out to. We are told there is a lot more to medical treatment than just the cost involved, and by putting an emphasis on the fees being charged we are encouraging patients to choose the least expensive rather than the best quality treatment.

The fear among medical professionals is that open price competition will lead to a race to the bottom, where quality no longer matters. But this fear is blinding the same professionals to the reason that we are obsessed with price at WhatClinic.com:

This information is what the consumer wants.

Consider the following:

• 55% of all enquiries sent to clinics specifically mention the price, cost or fee being charged. This figure is even higher when the price has not been published.
• 84% of our visitors from the UK admit to having delayed dental work because of the costs involved. This is a shameful statistic.
• Nearly 100% of consumers who travel abroad for medical treatments cite price as their primary motivation, and yet they are generally unaware of affordable treatment options at home because of the dearth of price information available locally.

After 4 years of running WhatClinic.com and over a million patient introductions to clinics we know that price is the number one piece of information potential patients are interested in. They want price transparency and we intend to work continually to provide it.

The Information Vacuum

We understand that a price alone can’t tell the whole story. There are different material options available, providers can have different qualifications and experience, and facilities can be state of the art, or decades old. This information is difficult to communicate to consumers, but the answer isn’t to create an information vacuum.

It is a simple fact that the clinics that share the most information on our website are the same ones who gain the most new patients. Their openness and transparency builds trust before the consumer even picks up the phone or types their email.

And it’s not just prices we are interested in publishing. We want to encourage clinics to share as much relevant information with the public as possible. What brand of dental implant do you use? How many times have you performed a tummy tuck? What specialist training do you have? How long have you been practicing?

The fact remains though, “How much do you charge for… ?” is one of the most common enquiries that clinics receive from patients, and if you’re going to tell patients how much you charge, why not tell them why you charge that much by providing a little extra information? Prices don’t tell the whole story, but they are a starting point.

Obviously not all treatments can have a fixed price, but they should all have a fixed lowest price. Price ranges give patients a clear idea of what to expect even if they’re not exact. By not publishing any prices at all though patients often feel that the price they are quoted has more to do with their ability to pay than the treatment they will receive, and ultimately encourages them to “shop around”.

The Language Problem

Another issue that gets raised time and time again is the wording used when talking about these issues. “Patients aren’t consumers”, “we have fees, not prices”, and “dentistry isn’t a commodity, you can’t compare prices” are common complaints.

The problem here though is that patients, or consumers, or visitors, or whichever word you want to use to describe them don’t care which wording is correct. They talk about prices and they talk about cost. They nearly never talk about fees.

Moreover, how they talk is how they search on the internet, so in order to get the information to them today that’s how we talk too. If and when the public start talking about fees instead of prices or costs, then we will too.

Of course dentists are right when they say “dentistry isn’t a commodity”, but unless they publish qualitative data too, which the vast majority don’t right now, then price is the only piece of information the patient has access to, which effectively results in a commodification of the market.

Helping Patients Get Treated

It’s our view that getting hung up on semantics does nothing to help patients get treated, and really that’s the common goal that we share with the clinics and health professionals who use our service.

We want to share price information because patients want it. We want to share quality information, because patients should know about it. And we want to share availability information because it makes all our lives that little bit easier.