Medical price comparision website WhatClinic.com will be hiring an extra 10 employees in its Dublin office, the company has announced.
The positions will be spread across the company’s sales, marketing and software engineering departments, with hiring starting immediately.
WhatClinic.com allows users to research and compare prices for elective medical procedures in Ireland, the UK and further afield. The company will open offices in the UK and South America in the next 12 months, although headquarters will remain in its Dublin office on Duke Lane, according to marketing manager Philip Boyle.
“About 65pc of our traffic right now comes from the UK and Ireland, with the rest spread out all over the world. Our main targets for growth are the UK, followed by South and Central America.”
Boyle says the company’s service goes further than general business directories like Yell and Google Places.
“The general directories don’t go into much detail past name, address and phone number.”
WhatClinic, he says, adds significant value by combining extensive research with insights gleaned from its community of users.
“We aim to give patients useful information about prices, availability and quality through a combination of our own research, information from the clinics themselves, and user-generated content.”
It’s a service that has worked well in Ireland and the UK so far, and Boyle sees no reason why the same cannot be true for larger markets in Brazil and Spanish-speaking South America.
“Effectively, we’ll repeat what we’ve done in Ireland and the UK, which is get the data, build the traffic, get people using the site, and by getting people to use the site we immediately show clients the value of the service.”
Boyle says that when WhatClinic first launched in Ireland, consumers were not used to using the internet to look for goods and services, but that situation has changed as both customers and businesses embrace doing business and research online. He thinks this trend will be replicated in South and Central America.
“The size of the market is big enough, and we think we can get the same kind of business model going.”
In terms of competition, Boyle cites the US service ZocDoc, but points out that “right now we don’t operate in that space, and they don’t operate outside it”.
Caelen King founded WhatClinic four years ago, and the company has received backing from Enterprise Ireland and a number of private investors.
Jack Horgan-Jones
