WhatClinic expands international footprint with dedicated German website

WhatClinic, the private medical search engine used by millions of patients every month, today rolled out WhatClinic.de, a dedicated German language version of their global medical tourism platform. With over 100 million German speakers worldwide, WhatClinic plans to augment its core traffic with German growth, initially aimed at the medical tourism market.

With significant traffic and revenue growth year on year, this investment, close to €1 million, is the first step in a long term global strategy to cement WhatClinic’s position as the market leader in patient acquisition and communication. The multi-channel marketplace site sees hundreds of thousands of patients each year engage via phone, email and SMS with over 120,000 clinics worldwide, in over 130 countries.

The company has invested a year of engineering resources to rebuild and launch their search platform entirely in German. The core WhatClinic platform enables English speaking patients all over the world to find, compare, book and review private clinics, a vertical that has seen significant competition from the likes of Realself, ZocDoc and others. According to WhatClinic research, the elective healthcare market is valued at over half a trillion euro, (excluding China), with half of that attributed to elective dental treatment. In 2015, WhatClinic made the acquisition of UK competitor Toothpick, a leading dental booking platform, as part of its exploration of the dental market.

In 2017, over 17 million English-speaking patients used the site to compare treatment in private clinics at home and abroad. WhatClinic is free for consumers, and charges a small portion of clinics for premium listings, which are labelled at the top of search results, in a similar format to the way Google Ads are shown.

Key healthcare markets seeking German-speaking patients include Turkey and the Czech Republic, with hair transplant and high end dental the most competitive in recent years.

“A German language site was a clear opportunity for us to help more consumers. We already have thousands of clinics in many markets that seek to engage with German-speaking patients, and they tell us so as part of the on-boarding process.” said WhatClinic CEO, Caelen King.

The investment in infrastructure development while substantial, is part of a longer term business approach that will enable WhatClinic to support consumers in any language in the future, not just those which use the Roman alphabet, including Arabic, Russian, Mandarin and others.