Ctrl-Alt-Health

Over the past few months, we audited 80 small local practices across Northern Virginia, Maryland, and the surrounding area — dental offices, family and internal medicine physicians, pediatricians, and specialists; solo doctors and small groups, the kind of practices that anchor their towns. We checked each one the way a new patient would: find them on a phone, judge the website, try to book. If you run a small practice of any kind — dental, medical, specialty — these findings apply to you, becau...

It's 9:15 on a Tuesday night. A mother in Fairfax has a seven-year-old with an ear infection that's been building all evening. She's not going to the ER for this — she needs a pediatrician tomorrow. So she does what everyone does now: she searches from the couch. Two practices come up near her. The first one's website shows a phone number and "Call to schedule." She calls anyway, knowing better, and gets voicemail. The second practice's site has a button: *Request an appointment.* Thirty seconds...

A patient in Silver Spring picks up her phone and asks, "Who's a good family doctor near me that takes new patients?".  She doesn't scroll through ten blue links. She doesn't open Google Maps. The AI assistant on her phone answers in a sentence or two — three practice names, a line about each, done. Was yours one of them? Most practice owners have never checked. And that's the problem, because more of your future patients are asking questions exactly this way — through ChatGPT, through Siri, thr...