First of all let me me say a big thanks to everyone who came along to our office launch event last night. I hope you all enjoyed yourselves and the wise words offered by Caelen and by our guest Stephen Donnelly, independent TD for Wicklow and East Carlow.

Today we’re delighted to be able to announce 10 new jobs here in Dublin with hiring starting immediately. Full details are in the press release below:

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Health Search Engine WhatClinic.com Announce 10 New Jobs In Dublin
Plans announced to open operations in the UK and Brazil within 12 months

13 October 2011, Dublin – WhatClinic.com have today announced 10 new jobs in their Dublin office. Hiring for positions in sales, marketing and software engineering will start immediately. The health search engine helps private patients research and contact clinics for elective treatments, a market which is worth €6 billion annually in the UK and Ireland alone. WhatClinic.com are the dominant player in this sector and have brought web review, reservation and information services to an industry that is just beginning to harness the web to drive business.

In addition to the jobs announced for Dublin the profitable startup plans to open an office in Brazil in 2012 to help it expand into the even larger South American market. A UK sales office will also be opened in the next 6 months.

Founded in Dublin four years ago, WhatClinic.com currently employs 15 people and is looking to strengthen its existing operations and accelerate its growth with the newly announced positions. The company is backed by Enterprise Ireland and a number of private investors including well known technology entrepreneur Ray Nolan.

“We’re delighted to be able to announce these new jobs today which will help WhatClinic.com continue its rapid growth” said Philip Boyle, Marketing Manager at the company. “The new staff can look forward to helping us give millions of patients easy access to better information about their treatment options.”

About WhatClinic.com

WhatClinic.com is a health care search engine that helps private patients get the treatment they want at a clinic that suits their needs. With easy access to prices, patient reviews and qualifications along with addresses, phone numbers and email facilities, patients can make better informed decisions by comparing all of their treatment options. Serving more than eight million visitors annually from the UK, Ireland, and further afield WhatClinic.com helps patients find clinics in the fields of dentistry, plastic surgery, fertility, laser eye surgery, cosmetic beauty, and many more.

For more information please contact:

Philip Boyle at WhatClinic.com
Tel: +353 (0) 1 525 3597
Email: pboyle@whatclinic.com

On Wednesday the 12th of October we’re officially opening our new offices on Duke Lane Upper right in the heart of Dublin and we’d love it if you could join us between 5pm and 7pm for some light refreshments, which, along with the usual wine and beer, will probably include cheese from Caelen’s new favourite shop Sheridan’s Cheesemongers.

After 7pm the further pint shaped refreshments will be served in Kehoe’s of South Anne Street, conveniently located right across the road from our front door.

If you need any further directions just get in touch. If you are coming along drop us a line by email or by phone, or on Twitter, or in the comments below.

WhatClinic.com
12 Duke Lane Upper
Dublin 2

Tel: 01 6520520
Email: pboyle@whatclinic.com / cking@whatclinic.com
Twitter: @phil_whatclinic / @whatclinic

P.S. Apologies for the static Google map above – Google Maps and Google Places seem to be a little confused about where we are. Please don’t turn up to Westland Row by mistake!

Most of you reading will probably be familiar with the phrase “price discrimination“. It refers to the practice of charging different amounts to different people for the same product or service. Effectively, you are charged based on your ability to pay, not on what you receive in return.

We came across an interesting example of price discrimination recently when talking to some solicitors. They listed a set of criteria which they use as the basis of calculating what they charge their clients. These included:

• The value of the item / deal / property involved
• How important the matter is to the client
• The rarity of the questions raised

So, for instance, two people getting exactly the same advice about a property deal can be charged different amounts depending on the value of each of the deals, and a company can be charged more depending on “how important” a matter is to it, or how often the question comes up!

Is it any wonder the legal profession is under scrutiny for its pricing practices?

This week we moved into our new offices on Duke Lane Upper right in the heart of Dublin city centre. Above you can see a few pictures of the sales and engineering teams, our temporary meeting table, and our very blue sofa in the kitchen / lounge area.

For anyone who wants to get in touch with us our new address is:

WhatClinic.com
12 Duke Lane Upper
Dublin 2
Ireland

Our phone number stays the same: +353 1 6520520

We’ll be hosting a little office warming event soon which we’d love you to join us at, so keep an eye out for details here and on our Twitter accounts: Caelen / Phil

Do you have too much to read?

Recently I was forced to reset my Google Reader account thanks to Google’s recent account clean up. The upside of this was that I had to resubscribe to any RSS feed I still wanted to read regularly. A few essentials were added first: Google’s Webmaster Central, SEOMoz, Distilled and so on. Then a few other favourites like Fred Wilson’s AVC blog and Mark Suster’s Both Sides Of The Table were added.

What really struck me though was the number of subscriptions I didn’t want to keep up with any more. This was largely for three reasons:

1. I was no longer that interested in the topic
2. The content was too repetitive
3. The content volume and quality had spiralled out of control

For the first reason there was nothing the publisher could have done to keep me as a subscriber. For the second reason, it was possible but unlikely. Some of the topics were quite niche and there wasn’t a lot new to say on a regular basis. However the third reason is completely within every publisher’s control.

Straying From The Original Plot

I’ll pick out Mashable as an example. It’s quite a regular occurrence that when I open my reader in the morning there are 30 or 40 stories in the Mashable folder. Buried in there somewhere are the one or two that I might still find interesting, but there is no way I’m going wade through the rest to find them, especially considering that another more focused blog is bound to reblog it, or someone in my Twitter stream will tweet about it.

Mashable, along with a growing number of other web properties, seem to be obsessed with growing visitor numbers at the expense of focus and even quality control, and in doing so they publish so often and on so many topics that I’m no longer interested in what Mashable has to offer. The same can be said for a growing number of blogs that are looking to grow visitors numbers by growing the number of articles they publish per day.

A Pivot From Niche To Mainstream

Mashable is supposed to be about Social Media News and Web Tips according to it’s own homepage <title> tag. So why is it publishing a story today about the new HTC Sensation XE with Beats Audio? And what about its article on Expanding Your Startup To International Markets? Or even the new version of VMware Fusion? Quite simply they know that these articles will gather traffic because they know they can rank easily. But should they publish them in the first place?

I guess the question comes down to this. Do Mashable just want as much traffic as they can get their hands on, or do they want to be the go to source for social media news? Do they want to be mainstream or niche? The answer in this particular case seems pretty clear to me. Maybe they will succeed in becoming the next Wired, and if that’s what they want, good luck to them. But in the meantime, when I want some social media news, I’ll go to a social media specialist source.

My tip? Unless you’re trying to be come a broad news aggregator stick to what you know, and what your readers want, and make sure you have something to say. If that means publishing less often, so be it, but at least you know that the resulting relevant traffic will be because of the quality of your content and not just because of the volume of articles you publish.

Identity, or rather the ability to create new identities, is a key facet of the internet. Some people troll away on internet forums under assumed names just to cause trouble, while others use made up identities to expose political scandal or even circumvent local laws. This ability to change identity at will is both a boon to the creative and a bane to the legislative, but in its own way it drives innovation and change.

Identity And Social Media

Eric Schmidt of Google spoke recently at the Edinburgh International Television Festival to announce the launch of Google Television in Europe, which should hit our shores in the new year. However, he also took some questions, including one from Andy Carvin about Google Plus (G+). He asked “how Google justifies the policy [of making people use their real name] given that real identities could put people at risk?”

Schmidt’s answer was that G+ was built primarily an identity service, and that people were free not to use it if they felt they could be putting themselves at risk. I found the answer a little disappointing, especially given the tone of his actual speech which took issue with the ongoing split between the sciences and the arts in the UK.

By forcing G+ users to use their real identities Google are in effect silencing the weird and the creative along with the subversive and the disruptive, leaving them to create their “fake” identities on message boards and Twitter and Facebook instead. Google’s attitude appears to be driven by their desire to use G+ data as part of their search results algorithm as a way of reducing web spam, but this seems like a short sighted method of guaranteeing the authenticity of a +1 click for instance.

Authentication vs Identity

Rather than focus purely on identity I think Facebook and Twitter are getting it right by focusing on authentication. By verifying that you are the person who created a certain Facebook or Twitter account you can continue that internet persona uninterrupted on a myriad of different sites. You could potentially Like things more than once, or share them on multiple Twitter accounts, but does that really cause a problem when a real person does it once or twice?

Say you could have more than one G+ account then, how many people would go to go to the trouble of creating two accounts to game Google’s search results? A lot unfortunately. There’s real money riding on it after all, and knowing the experience of Black Hat SEO practitioners and their “creative” ways of building links, they’ve probably already gotten around Google’s current protections anyway.

Google really are going to be fighting an uphill battle to keep it to one account per person. Twitter suffers a great deal from fake accounts being set up for spam purposes. Facebook apparently less so, even though Facebook Likes are now almost a web currency of their own. But companies with people as smart as the ones at Google, Facebook and Twitter should be able to decouple the ideas of multiple (valid) identities and spambots created purely to manipulate results.

Who Are You Right Now?

I think Fred Wilson’s take on Identity and Authentication is pretty spot on too. He comes at it from a slightly different angle, not so much about fake or hidden identities but rather about his real identity being split across different sites for different reasons. It was for exactly this reason that G+ made the leap forward it did with Circles, letting people split out who they talk to based on some common themes, but by tying it all to your real name it restricts itself unnecessarily.

Quinton O’Reilly also recently covered some of the problems that arise from having a publicly accessible profile with its own unique persona, especially when potential employers come looking to dig up some dirt on you. To me that’s all the more reason why people should be allowed to have different accounts, or identities if they want to. In fact, it’s almost exactly the reason that most people I know on LinkedIn are members of that site. They don’t want their Facebook profiles perused by employers, colleagues or customers!

Should Businesses Care?

Which brings me to the business end of things. Most people who use WhatClinic.com use their real names when they create an enquiry and they use real email addresses and real phone numbers. But do we know if they just created that email account, or just bought a prepaid mobile phone? No. Do we know if they’re using a pseudonym? No. Should we care? Not really. So long as the clinic can actually contact the user they’re free to call themselves whatever they want.

People change depending on the situation they’re in. They do it in the real world and they do it online, and I doubt even Google are going to be able to stop that.

Google Analytics was recently updated to change how it calculated when a visitor’s session ended. We were told this should have only a small effect, around 1% on average, on how our visitors were being counted. The change went live on Thursday August 11th. If you look at the graph above you can see on Friday the 12th our reported visits increased by over 40%. This trend continued for nearly a week.

Now a 40% increase in traffic would obviously be welcome, but our unique visitors report told a very different story. Nothing had changed much at all!

So, what was going on? It turns out there were some bugs in the Analytics update that created new sessions for users when they should have had only one. Full details are in the update to the announcement of the original change. It would seem that in our case visitors who clicked the back button in their browser to go back to the landing page they arrived on were being counted multiple times.

Google pushed a fix to this problem on Tuesday the 16th of August and everything seems to be back to normal now, but I’m sure we’re not alone in having spent some time trying to work out what was going on and what changes we’d need to make to be able to compare reports from before and after the change. Thankfully it looks like that’s not an issue anymore. Still, it seems like a pretty big bug to slip through the net for such an important product.

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.

Today we release the results of a nationwide survey of prices at UK private dental clinics. The results are startling, with similar treatments costing over 900 percent more depending on which clinic you choose.

Shockingly, 84 percent of UK visitors to WhatClinic.com say they have put off dental treatment because of the cost. These patients could be putting their oral health at risk despite the wide range of prices available even at a local level.

For the survey we gathered prices from over 500 private dental clinics in the UK. The chart with prices from 5 major cities below shows the level of variation that can be found. We hope that by showing patients that they have real choice that we can encourage more to actually go ahead with treatment and take care of their oral health.

To embed the first image on your own site use this HTML:
<img src="http://blog.whatclinic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/price-survey-national-landscape.gif" alt="WhatClinic.com UK Private Dentists Price Survey 2011" />

To embed the image below use this HTML:
<img src="http://blog.whatclinic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/price-survey-cities-long.gif" alt="WhatClinic.com UK Private Dentistry Price Survey 2011" />

Full details of our press release including print resolution copies of the infographics above can be found here:

Patients pay over 900 percent more for private dental treatments depending on which clinic they choose

The New WhatClinic.com Homepage

After a lot of work behind the scenes we’re really happy to be able to share our new look website with you all. The redesign extends across the whole site, from the homepage pictured above right down to the clinics’ enquiries forms. We hope the new colour scheme and layout changes make things easier to read and find on the page. We’ll be keeping a close eye on our analytics to watch out for any big changes in user behaviour and share any insights we come up with.

As part of the redesign we’ve started to include social networking elements to the site, so if there’s a clinic that you’re particularly happy with, go and find its listing and give it a Facebook Like, a Google +1, or just Tweet it out to your followers. If you want to like WhatClinic.com you can do that in the box on the right hand side of this page, or in the footer of any page on the main website.

We’d love to hear any feedback you have about the new look so leave us a comment or send me a tweet to @phil_whatclinic and let us know what you think.