Ctrl-Alt-Health

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...

Most practice owners last looked at their own website on a desktop monitor in the office. It loaded quickly. The photos looked right. The phone number was where it was supposed to be. Everything seemed fine. The problem is that almost none of your new patients are seeing the site you saw. Over 70% of healthcare searches now happen on a smartphone. A patient looking for an internist, a dermatologist, or a specialist is almost always holding a phone, often one-handed, often with a crying kid nearb...

There's a version of this conversation we have regularly with practice owners: they built a solid website a couple of years ago, handed it off to someone to host, and largely moved on. The site works. Patients find them. Why fix what isn't broken? The honest answer is that what isn't broken today may already be losing ground — because the ground has shifted significantly in the last 12 months. The digital environment your website was built for no longer exists. The practices adapting now will ha...