Anaks Labs
Article 09

How many, not who

A practice needs to know whether its website produces anything. It does not need to know that a particular person spent four minutes reading about root canals at eleven at night. Those two are usually delivered by the same arrangement, and almost no clinic owner has been shown where the line between them currently sits on their own site.

Published · Anaks Labs

Two questions that arrive in one box

The first is a counting question. How many people got in touch last month, through which route, after looking at what. It is answered with totals, and totals about a hundred strangers tell you nothing about any one of them.

The second is an identity question. Which person, doing what, over how many visits, matched against a profile of them held somewhere else. It is answered with records that follow individuals, and it is the one that generates the marketing capabilities everybody advertises.

Practices are almost always sold the second in order to obtain the first. That is worth noticing, because the first is what a clinic actually needs to run its business and the second is what creates every obligation and every risk attached to the arrangement.

Why a clinic is not a hardware shop

For most local businesses this is a matter of taste. For a practice it is not, and the reason is simple enough to state in one sentence: which page somebody read can itself be sensitive.

A visit to a page about implants, orthodontics for adults, sedation, or a specific procedure is a fact about a person's health, or at least about what they are worried about. When that page view is attached to something that identifies the visitor, and when it is shared onward with parties whose business is building profiles of people, the practice has become a source of health information about individuals who never agreed to that and are not yet patients.

We are not giving you legal advice and this article contains none. Your obligations are a question for your own advisor, and they are not the same for every practice. What we are saying is narrower and is a matter of fact rather than law: this data exists, most practice owners do not know what is being collected on their behalf, and the question is answerable.

What is genuinely worth counting

Nearly everything a clinic owner needs from a website can be expressed as events with no person attached.

  • How many people got in touch, and by which route

    Calls started from the site, forms submitted, booking attempts. A count of occurrences, not a list of names.

  • Which pages the site's visitors actually reach

    In aggregate, and over a month. Useful for deciding what is missing, and it does not require following anybody between pages.

  • Whether that number is moving

    Against last month and against the same month last year. This is the only trend line most practices ever need and it is the one least often produced.

  • What did not happen

    Forms opened and abandoned, in aggregate. A count of drop-offs is one of the more informative figures available and it identifies nobody at all.

Six questions for whoever runs your site

Ask them in writing, so that there is a record of the reply. None of these requires you to understand the answer in technical terms — you are listening for whether a clear answer exists.

  • 1. What is collected the moment somebody opens a page?

    Before they do anything. Before they consent to anything. Simply by arriving.

  • 2. Which other companies receive any of it?

    Not "is it secure" — who else gets a copy. Ask for the list, and ask whether it is complete.

  • 3. Is anything joined to an identity?

    An email address, a phone number, an account somewhere else, or an identifier that follows the same person across sites. This is the hinge the whole subject turns on.

  • 4. Can any of it be tied to a page about a particular condition or procedure?

    This is the question specific to a clinic, and it is the one most likely to produce a pause.

  • 5. How long is it kept, and who decided that?

    If the answer is that nobody chose and it is whatever the default was, that is a real answer and worth writing down.

  • 6. Could you have answered question one yourself this morning?

    Put to yourself rather than to them. If the practice cannot describe what its own website collects, then whatever is being collected is being collected in your name and on your responsibility, without your knowledge.

What an unclear answer indicates

Usually not malice. The most common reason a supplier cannot answer question two is that the site inherited its arrangement from a template, a previous developer or an agency that has since been replaced, and nobody has looked since. That is an ordinary situation and it is still your practice's situation.

What it tells you is that the collection currently happening was not a decision anybody made. Decisions can be reviewed. Accidents cannot, because nobody knows they are there.

Where we stand on this

Our own tracking is built so that no patient data reaches our systems at all: we record that an inquiry happened, not who made it. We are describing that because it is the arrangement we are accountable for, not as a recommendation about what yours should be. The point of this article is the six questions, and they are worth asking of any supplier, ourselves included.

What we run every month, including what the tracking does and does not record →

Read next