How we order results

Who can appear at all

Before anything is ordered, a listing has to qualify. A practice reaches your results only when all of this is true:

• The clinician is verified and their profile is complete enough to publish, photo included.
• They offer the care you searched for, in the setting you chose.
• They accept the insurance you selected.
• They serve your area and treat children of the age you are searching for.
• Their practice is set up to take bookings on Zentrumcare.

A listing that does not qualify is not moved further down the list. It is not shown at all, and no payment changes that.

How the list is ordered

Everything that qualifies is ordered by a single score, made of these signals:

• Bookable first. A practice with no bookable hours in the setting you chose sits below every practice that has them, whatever else is true about it.
• How far the practice is from where you searched. Telehealth is neutral — there is no trip to measure.
• Kept appointments and cancellations. A practice that keeps the appointments it accepts ranks above one that cancels on families, and a cancellation the practice caused weighs heaviest.
• The rating. Once a practice has at least three published reviews, its average review score is part of the order. Below three reviews it counts as average rather than as bad.
• How completely the profile is filled in: whether it accepts the insurance you named, lists the reason you searched for, and has a photo.
• A practice we have no history for yet — a new one, or one we have not measured — counts as average on that signal. A newcomer is neither promoted nor buried.
• The order never reads a bid, a campaign, an advertising budget, or how much a practice has paid us. That is built into how the software is put together, and it is tested on every change.

What Sponsored buys

A clinic can pay to place a card above the results of a search. That card always carries the “Sponsored” label, and this is exactly what the payment buys:

• One position above the list, for one search. At most two sponsored cards per search.
• Only in our default order. Sort by nearest or by soonest available and there are no sponsored cards at all.
• Only when your search names a kind of care. Browsing without one shows no sponsored card, and neither does the second page of results.
• The practice still holds its own earned position in the list below. No result is pushed off the page to make room for a paid one.

What Sponsored cannot buy

• The order of the results below it. That order is computed before any bid is read, and does not move because someone bought a card.
• A rating, a review, or a better score. Reviews come from families who attended an appointment.
• A richer card. A sponsored card carries the same insurance line, the same availability and the same distance as every other card.
• A different pin on the map. The map is geography, not advertising.
• A place on a practice's own page, or on the results when you sort by nearest or soonest.
• A place in results the practice does not qualify for — see who can appear, above.

How clinics pay us

Zentrumcare charges a practice a fee when a new family books with them. Sponsored placement is charged separately from that fee and never added on top of it.

• Families pay Zentrumcare nothing. What care costs stays between you, your practice and your insurer.
• Sponsored positions are sold by auction against a published minimum price for that kind of care. What a clinic pays is decided by the competing bids, not negotiated one clinic at a time.