Every practice eventually gets one: a review that is unfair, inaccurate, or from someone who was never a patient. The damage is usually done by the response rather than the review, so the first rule is procedural.
Do nothing for twenty-four hours
Do not reply the day you read it. The reply written in the first hour is the one that confirms a treatment relationship, discloses clinical detail, and argues in public. It cannot be unpublished.
Instead, in that first day:
- Screenshot the review with its date and author name for your records.
- Determine internally whether this appears to be a patient, without discussing it publicly.
- Assess whether it alleges harm, a privacy breach, or a licensing matter, in which case it goes to your privacy officer or counsel before any response.
- Check whether it breaches platform policy, which determines whether removal is realistic.
Deciding whether removal is possible
Platforms remove reviews for policy violations, not for being unfair. A negative but genuine account of someone experience will not be removed, and pursuing it wastes time.
Realistic grounds include:
- Not about your business, such as confusion with another practice.
- Conflict of interest, such as a competitor or a former employee.
- Harassment, hate speech, or profanity.
- Personal information disclosed, including another patient details.
- Spam or clearly fake content.
- Off-topic content unrelated to the patient experience.
Note one that is specific to healthcare: a review disclosing another person protected information, for example a family member describing a relative care in identifying detail, may be reportable on privacy grounds.
Not grounds for removal: being wrong, being harsh, being from someone whose expectations were unrealistic, or coming from a person you believe was never a patient but cannot say so publicly.
Reporting it properly
- Report through the platform process, citing the specific policy breached.
- Be factual and brief, and do not disclose patient information in your report. This is a real trap: practices sometimes explain to the platform that the reviewer was never treated, or describe what actually happened, which is a disclosure to a third party.
- Expect most reports to be declined. Removal is the exception.
- Do not report repeatedly, which achieves nothing.
Responding when it stays
Assume it stays, because it usually does. Use the pattern from earlier in this chapter, strictly:
- Thank them for the feedback.
- State a general standard.
- Offer an offline contact route.
- Stop.
Two or three sentences. No correction, no explanation, no reference to any visit. Remember that the audience for this reply is not the reviewer, who is unlikely to change their mind. It is the next fifty prospective patients, and what persuades them is a practice that responds with composure and discretion.
When it is a former employee or competitor
These are genuinely reportable as conflict-of-interest violations. Report with the specific policy cited, keep any evidence, and respond publicly with the same neutral pattern in the meantime. Do not identify them publicly, and do not allege anything you cannot prove.
When there is a real problem behind it
Sometimes the review is accurate and the practice failed. The response is still generic in public, but internally it should trigger something:
- Look at whether the complaint reflects a pattern rather than an incident.
- Most negative reviews in this specialty concern wait times, billing surprises, phone responsiveness, and communication, all fixable.
- Route clinical concerns into your quality process rather than treating them as marketing problems.
A practice that quietly fixes the cause stops generating the review.
The structural defence
The best protection is volume, built before you need it. One critical review among eight is devastating; among eighty it is unremarkable and even lends credibility.
So the answer to the fear of bad reviews is not suppression, which is covered in the previous lesson and creates worse problems. It is a steady, consistent review habit, which is the subject of a later lesson in this chapter. Where reviews matter beyond Google is next.