Dentists, chiropractors, therapists and other healthcare providers across Canada and the U.S. have gotten what seems at first to be an impressive award: The Patients’ Choice Award. Who wouldn’t be flattered to receive an award that names them as the best clinic for their specialty in their city? But, how exclusive is this award, how are the winners determined, what are people saying about it, and what is its true purpose? In short, are the awards legitimate? To answer these questions, you need to look at the complete picture, from the history of opencare.com to the way Opencare is doing business now.
A Short History of Opencare.com
Serial entrepreneurs Nikolai Bratkovski and Cameron Howieson started Opencare with the help of funding from angel investors and venture companies. A 2013 article in the Toronto Star by business reporter Michael Lewis states that Opencare.com started less than four years earlier, which would point to a beginning sometime around 2009. However, the Opencare.com website states in a short “About” section that the company was founded in 2012. A 2013 Facebook post by Opencare indicates that the company started as Healthaware and changed their business to the Opencare brand.
http://www.thestar.com/business/2013/11/28/tech_startup_tackles_health_care_sector.html
https://www.facebook.com/OpenCare1/posts/230991957039513
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As of February 2016, Opencare claimed to have a network of 140,000+ providers. In the same month, ScamAnalyzer.com reported that the site is number 231,230 in a field of over 30 million websites in the world. How have they gotten this far and what are their plans for ranking higher? The answer lies partly in their customer service tactics and partly in their use of Opencare awards to gain popularity.
https://www.opencare.com/about/
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http://scamanalyze.com/check/opencare.com.html
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Opencare Patients’ Choice Awards and the Promise of Prosperity
Opencare sends invitations to providers to accept their Patients’ Choice Awards. With thousands of patients connecting with them every day as they say, their suggestion that providers will gain new patients and grow their practices by having the award badge on their websites seems reasonable.
https://www.opencare.com/blog/opencare/patients-choice-awards/
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Are Awards Determined by Rankings or Something Else?
According to Opencare, the award is given to the top 25% of practices in each specialty. They say they have a ranking system called the Opencare Score that determines this figure based on online reviews, whether they are members of the Better Business Bureau, their history of professional misconduct and their years of experience.
https://www.opencare.com/blog/?p=1990
In a YouTube video titled “Opencare Warning for Chiropractors and Dentists,” Dr. Mike Hamilton, a chiropractic marketing expert with Inception Websites, says there is no ranking system at all. Hamilton proposes the awards are fakes, based on Opencare’s campaign designed not only to gain more providers for their website but also on their plan to surreptitiously improve their search engine rankings. Furthermore, Hamilton says the rankings on Opencare’s website are only available to providers who pay Opencare to be listed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T87jQay1ACM
What is the real truth? It is hard to say for sure. Opencare is obviously biased toward making the awards look legitimate. Hamilton’s explanation makes more sense in many ways, including the fact that a simple Google search reveals so many websites that display the badge.
Reviews Tell Part of the Story
Simply by having an Opencare Patients’ Choice Award badge on their website, a large number of dentists are giving a review of sorts. They are telling the world that they have a certain amount of faith in the company – at least enough to bank on Opencare’s reputation.
WOT, a site dedicated to rating the safety and reliability of websites around the globe, shows three favorable reviews and no negative ones. These positive reviews mention the ease of finding a physical therapist, a doctor and a dentist on the Opencare.com site. All three of the reviews expressed appreciation for the helpfulness of Opencare.com. (It is interesting to note that one of these reviews comes from etang20. Could this be Eva Tang, an employee of Opencare? It seems likely, since this is her handle on Twitter.) On the other hand, according to SixStat.com, WOT rates their trustworthiness to be very poor.
https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/opencare.com
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https://sixstat.com/ratings-reviews/opencare.com
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Complaints Abound
While there are many positive reviews concerning the benefits of using opencare.com, there are even more complaints. As you might guess, a great place to start in looking for complaints about Opencare is the Better Business Bureau. Interestingly, Opencare is not a member of the BBB. Furthermore several complaints have been filed with them. The San Francisco Chapter of the BBB reported 28 complaints on Opencare from February 2015 to February 2016..As of February 2016, Opencare has an F rating on an A+ to F scale – the lowest score possible with the BBB.
It’s important to note that many of the specific issues in the BBB complaints have been resolved. Providers have been taken off their call and email lists as requested. That does not mean the complainants were necessarily happy with the company. One consumer accepted the company’s response but still wanted to express the concern that Opencare had gone too far with creative marketing. Another wanted to make it clear that, although they accepted Opencare’s agreement to take them off their call list, they were still unhappy that Opencare had put them in their database even though the providers were not interested. A third consumer accepted Opencare’s response of taking off their call list but wanted to point out that the calls were excessive.
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Many other complaints come from around the web. On Ripoffreport.com, two complaints stand out. One is from a dentist who received multiple after-hours calls at the clinic’s dental emergency number. Another says Opencare has been spamming them continuously for years.
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Shady Business Practices Mark Opencare as a Dishonest Company
Opencare uses a variety of psychological tricks to get dentists and others to sign up for their services. One example is their supposed patient booking system. The Berdan Clinic in Fauquier, ON has posted a warning that Opencare is telling consumers they have an appointment with the clinic when in fact they do not. The post is a sincere apology to patients who have been spammed.
http://www.theberdanclinic.com/attention/
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Jaryn Hart’s Google+ post about Opencare reveals another deceptive practice. Jaryn is a freelance writer and social media specialist who works with Infinity Dental Web. One of the clients she works with called with the news that Opencare left a voicemail at one of Infinity’s dental clinic client’s number. The voicemail warned that the dental clinic was listed on Opencare as “Not accepting new patients.” The dentist looked at the Opencare.com listing and found that the call was correct. The problem is that the clinic never indicated to anyone that they were not accepting patients. They were accepting them all along and were troubled that consumers would think they were not.
https://plus.google.com/wm/1/+JarynHart/posts/bPQ9twr73A5
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Scattered across the web are other complaints about Opencare’s business practices. Because most of the complaints are anonymous, they are difficult if not impossible to verify. However, they point to shady techniques you need to watch out for when dealing with Opencare.com. Examples of methods ostensibly reported to Jerkcall.com include:
- Calling and hanging up unless the system routes them to voicemail.
- Calling excessively.
- Occasionally leaving spammy-sounding messages that ask for sensitive information.
- Pretending they need to know whether the clinic accepts Blue Cross/Blue Shield patients and then launching into a telemarketing type call.
http://jerkcall.com/1-415-830-6651
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In Dr. Dave Hamilton’s warning video mentioned earlier, Hamilton discusses how Opencare lists clinics as “Not accepting new patients” unless they pay Opencare to be listed. He calls this practice extortion. He also calls Opencare’s method of getting backlinks a way of cheating to get better search engine rankings.
Striking Backlink Gold
Backlinks are links that lead from one website to another. The more backlinks going from high quality sites to a particular site, the higher that site ranks in the search engines. This is one way Google determines which sites are most popular and relevant.
There are numerous ways to legitimately gain backlinks. For example, you can get backlinks by guest-blogging or having others contribute to your blog. You can also build links by interacting on social media. These techniques are certainly among the most honest ways to get backlinks, but they take time and effort.
searchengineland.com/5-techniques-to-safely-get-links-in-2015-212921
However, Opencare has found a faster way to get legitimate businesses to link to their site, and it has the potential of increasing their search engine rank dramatically in a very short time. All they have to do is offer an award to authentic healthcare providers that includes a link back to their site. Their strategy seems to be paying off in big numbers. According to WooRank.com, Opencare has 173,914 backlinks pointed toward their site.
https://www.woorank.com/en/www/opencare.com
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With the promise of standing out among providers in their specialty, dentists, chiropractors and others include the link with the badge. This gives Opencare a quick and easy ranking boost. Opencare has set out to strike backlink gold and could soon be among the top-ranking directory sites on the web.
Opencare has strong motivations for getting more traffic. First, as they become more popular, they can gain more paying providers for their network. Second, they can sell adspace on their site to gain even more revenues.
Including the Award May Provide Some Short-Term Advantages
Opencare provides dentists and chiropractors with an attractive badge that looks like a trustworthy assessment of a healthcare provider’s practice. Intel used a similar strategy to boost their credibility during their early years. They had many competitors. The biggest was Cyrix. Intel started offering discounts to their customers for putting the Intel Inside logo on their packaging. Consumers would see the Intel Inside logo everywhere they went to shop for computers. The natural but unfounded thinking was that the logo proved that the product was superior. Why else would companies put the logo on it? Consequently, the consumer would feel more secure buying a computer with the Intel logo.
In the same way, consumers will select your dental clinic because you have the Opencare badge on your site or the Opencare decal on your windows. Although the long-term value of adding the award to your site is questionable, you might see some temporarily positive results. You could end up being listed on a site that is considered legitimate even if it is not. Think of how popular the Intel Inside logo has become. The difference between Intel and Opencare is that Intel has now proven to be a legitimate and sometimes better processor than their competitors. With so many clinics getting the Opencare Patients’ Choice Award, does it follow that all clinics that display the Opencare badge are better than other clinics listed on Opencare?
Why Shouldn’t You Add the Link?
If Opencare is being so kind as to give you this impressive award, why shouldn’t providers add the link to their site along with the badge? After all, honest business people give credit where credit is due. Besides, including the link back to their website should benefit them by showing them at the top of Opencare’s list of providers, right?
The primary problem with this thinking is that for true reciprocity, each party needs to give something of value. Dentists and chiropractors need to make sure they are getting some advantage for the goodwill they show. Otherwise, they are not contributing to a mutual relationship but simply allowing themselves to be used for someone else’s gain. The truth is that the award comes with no guarantees that the provider’s practice will be listed first or even near the first. When potential patients which you acquire by spending on marketing or building a good reputation come to your site and click on the link included with the badge, they are taken to Opencare’s page for your city – not directly to your listing. By including the link, you are likely to increase the ranking for Opencare page. You are not only passing your potential patients to them, but you are also passing a higher search ranking to their page. In addition, as Dr. Hamilton suggests, the placement on the site may only be a matter of who pays for Opencare’s services. To test this hypothesis, we clicked on the badges. Many of them lead to a listing page where the clinic that posted the badge was not found.
Another problem is that Opencare is beginning to get a bad reputation on the web. Although many legitimate businesses are not informed of Opencare’s deceitful practices, many others are starting to recognize that the Opencare Patients’ Award is much too easy to get to be a valuable assessment of which clinic is the best. More and more complaints and negative reviews have been lodged online, so anyone who researches the company before using it is likely to be skeptical of their recommendations. As the company’s reputation goes down, so do the reputations of the professionals who are listed with them.
Finally, as Opencare increases the popularity of their site through backlinks and gaining more traffic, your own website’s ranking is likely to go down. It works like this: someone types in your city and specialty, such as “Mississauga dentist”. Instead of your site being ranked near the top of the search engine results page, Opencare gets top billing. Do you really want to compete with them for search engine traffic in your area?
What We Suggest
In our opinion, the best course of action is to simply decline the offer to add the badge and link to your website and politely ask they do not contact you. Why should you take a chance on Opencare’s brand when the very real possibility exists that it will lose its perceived credibility and come to be known to many people as an unethical company?
If you do decide to go for the short-term advantages of a temporary image of credibility and increased patients, we suggest you add the badge but not the link. Are you willing to take the risk that even poorly trained dental practices will be listed right along with yours? Only you can decide.
Our Conclusion About Opencare Patients’ Choice Awards
In the end, most awards are nothing more than revenue and marketing tools for the business offering it. They are rarely based on unbiased voting from the public. For most, you have to pay to get the award or to receive enough votes to get it.
Is Opencare blatantly unethical or a “scam”? That depends on your perspective. Some would say yes. Others would point to similar aggressive practices being used by Uber as well as Microsoft in its early days.
Our opinion is the same as most online reviews, that Opencare Patients’ Choice Awards have gone too far. They have misled honest health practitioners in a sneaky attempt to decrease the effectiveness of those practices’ SEO and redirect prospective patients to competitors. Will their ploy be successful? The choices of savvy professionals and web-wise consumers can turn the tide and reveal Opencare for what it is – a company that has crossed the line with its creative marketing and questionable business practices.
The post Are Opencare Awards Legit or a Scam? appeared first on Dentistry Business.