Ctrl-Alt-Health

A patient leaves a one-star review. You know they were never actually unhappy with the care. They went to the wrong location — your old address, still live on a directory you forgot about — waited, gave up, and blamed you. Now the review sits on your Google profile, and you can't get it taken down because technically, from Google's perspective, it describes a real experience. This is not a rare scenario. It happens to medical practices every week, and most of them don't find out until someone me...

It's 10:47 PM on a Tuesday. A patient finishes reading about their symptoms, decides they need to see a specialist, and pulls up their phone to find one. They find your practice. They click "Book Online." The next available appointment is six weeks out. They close the tab and try the next result. You never knew they were there. The Hidden Waiting Room Problem Most practice managers think of their booking system as a convenience feature. In 2026, it is a gatekeeping system — and if it's misconfig...

A quick round-up of the posts practice owners and operators have returned to most often — and the single thread connecting all of them. Over the past several weeks we’ve published a short series on the specific, fixable reasons medical practice websites quietly lose new patients. Enough practice owners have written in or asked us follow-up questions that we’re pulling the most-read pieces into a single place — both as a reading list and as a map of where the series is going next. This post is in...

Local search has quietly split into two systems. Most practices are only optimized for one of them. Ten years ago, a patient looking for a new dermatologist in a specific town did one thing: they typed “dermatologist near me” into Google, scanned the first page of results, and called whichever listing looked most credible. That was the game. Practices that ranked for local searches won. Practices that didn’t, lost. That game still exists. But there is now a second one running alongside it — and ...