Your clinic's reputation when AI answers first

3 days ago

4 min read

A clinic owner outside a larger Danish city told me her appointment book had started showing gaps in the mornings. Not many, but enough for her to notice. She ranks number one on Google in her town. The reviews are good. The team is capable. And still, fewer new patients were coming in.

She asked a young patient how he had found the clinic. He shrugged and said he had just asked his phone which dentist to pick. The AI assistant on the phone read out reviews and opening hours and suggested two clinics in town. Hers wasn't one of them. Luckily for the clinic, that young patient had a mother who booked the appointment without knowing anything about his AI answer.

Your clinic's online reputation

For many years the plan was simple. Do good work, let patients pass it on, and be easy to find on Google (SEO). That is how clinics attracted more patients, grew, and kept an eye on the clinic's reputation. Now there is a new filter sitting between the patient and the search result. An AI assistant that reads the reviews, compares them, and gives one answer. The patient never clicks through to the website. She only sees the conclusion.

What I see in the clinics I visit is the same pattern over and over. The owner handed off "the website" years ago (and hasn't updated it since). Reviews turn up by accident. Nobody asks the happy patient on her way out the door. Name, number and opening hours are listed differently in five places online, because nobody has maintained the digital traces in a long time. All of it because nobody ever told the clinic owner that this is her responsibility and a job that has to be done again and again.

It sounds like marketing. So the job usually ends up with an agency, a son or a nephew with "a flair for IT", or nowhere at all. But it belongs somewhere else entirely. Reputation is the sum of the work you have already done, made visible to a machine that now speaks on the patient's behalf.

Three steps to get started

The good news is that you don't need a bigger budget to put this right. What you need is a decision about who owns the problem, combined with a fixed rhythm. Three steps are enough to get started.

Start by giving the job a name and making one person responsible. Someone on the team takes on the clinic's digital face, with a fixed fifteen minutes a week. It can't be left to chance, to whenever there happens to be time for it, because there never is.

Then there is the timing. The happy patient is in the chair, right after a treatment that went well. That is where you ask for the review, as part of what you are already saying while the patient gets up. Not an email three weeks later, when the feeling has long since cooled off. Work out who on the team is going to ask, and how. You can combine it with software that takes over part of the job, though that costs money and takes a little more time to use.

And then keep your online presence consistent. Same name, number and opening hours everywhere, and a calm reply when someone writes, to the happy review and to the angry one alike. That is the signal the machine reads when it decides who to recommend.

You steer the clinic yourself

If you do nothing, nothing dramatic happens. The clinic keeps doing good work. The machine just never notices. The new patients slowly go somewhere else and you spot it in the appointment book six months later, the way she did.

If you do it, the recommendation starts to look like the treatment you actually give. The reputation is still earned through the work done at the chair, the way it always has been. The only new thing is that somebody at your clinic now has the job of making it visible to the AI assistants.

So consider this. If a patient asks her phone to recommend a dentist in your town tomorrow, what does it see? And who at your clinic has checked within the last month?

Who owns the clinic's digital face

This is one of those places where a leadership responsibility ends up disguised as a technical detail. Who owns the clinic's digital face is something I'll write more about over the fall.

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