Ctrl-Alt-Health, Page 2 of 5

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 ...

Large systems are spending millions to build the patient experience smaller practices already deliver. Technology finally levels the field. Walk into the lobby of a new ambulatory campus built by one of the national hospital systems and you will see the word everywhere. Concierge care. Patient experience. Guided journey. The brand promises look almost identical to what smaller practices have been quietly delivering for decades: a real human who knows your name, a staff that remembers your family...

The decision framework doctors need when marketing attention has to pick one. Practice owners ask us a version of the same question every week: “Should I focus on my Google reviews first, or fix my website?” It is a fair question. Both cost money. Both cost attention. And in a normal quarter, a practice can only meaningfully improve one at a time. The right answer is less satisfying than most people want, and more actionable than most people expect. Reviews and websites do different jobs in a ne...