How to protect your practice from third-party advertising sites

The AMA has had several recent queries about third-party commercial websites (such as Zable) which are harvesting data from medical practices to advertise the (alleged) average waiting times and average costs for various procedures charged by private specialist practices.

Some of these websites are using publicly available data, some are ‘scraping’ (copying) data from medical practice websites, and in some cases, website operators appear to be obtaining data (which may not always be correct) over the phone from medical practice front-desk staff. 

Here are some tips for members to help deal with this situation:

• If you don’t want such information advertised on these sites (or any particular site) you should check the site(s) to see if they offer a way to remove your profile. (For example, on Zable, you can click https://providers.zable.com.au/profile-removal).
  • If a website does not provide a self-service link to let you remove your profile from the site, and if they are unwilling to remove the data themselves, let us know at consultations@ama.com.au
• Talk to practice staff about checking that callers who want to know things like average waiting times or average costs are genuine patients with a referral, and to be cautious about providing average ‘cost’ information unless the relevant doctor is happy to provide it.

• You may also want to amend your website to make it clear that you do not authorise data scraping. For example, some websites include text along the following lines:
  • “Your use of this website is subject to the following terms and conditions. You must not extract or re-use any content on our website without our express written consent. This includes, but is not limited to, the use of data mining, robots, or similar data gathering and extraction tools."