Patient Reviews: The Most Important Form of "Social Proof"

The Patient Whisperers
Nov 30
4 min read

What patients care about when they research your practice

As published in the November/December 2025 issue of Administrative Eyecare. To subscribe or view the entire publication, visit their website.

We all have a website for our practice. There’s no question that it’s a must—a website provides an opportunity to make a good first impression before patients call us or step into our practice. In 2016, a survey by Google and Purchased found that 71% of people visited a business’s website before making a purchase, with the percentage even higher when it came to healthcare.

Today’s consumer is researching beyond our website: Our potential patient is looking for social proof. Social proof is what other people say about our practice online. Social media has changed the game—it’s easy to find a variety of voices and opinions, and our potential patient cares more about what other people say about us than anything we can put on our website. On social media, social proof includes other people’s posts about us, our follower count, engagement with our content, and more. Social proof also includes online patient reviews. While we can’t ignore social media, at this point, online reviews are still the most important piece of social proof for us in healthcare because:

Three of four U.S. adults read online patient reviews when deciding on a healthcare facility or physician.(1)
81% of patients review providers online (even after a referral), with 90% changing their mind about a referral if they don’t like what they see.(1)
Just one negative review can deter up to 22% of patients looking for a provider.(2)
49% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family.(2)

Most of us have invested a significant amount into our website to ensure it accurately represents our brand and educates potential patients about our services. But what if they’re turned off before they even view our website?

People will Google your practice, check out your Google Business profile and reviews, and then decide whether what they see impresses them enough to move forward. Research backs this up: Google is the No.1 review site used by healthcare consumers, more popular than other healthcare review sites. Higher reputation scores have 838% more clicks!(1)

It makes sense: We all behave similarly as consumers. If someone recommends a restaurant, we’re likely to read its reviews before visiting the website. If we order a phone case on Amazon, we typically compare ratings before making a decision. And that’s just a restaurant and phone case— nothing nearly as important to us as our health.

We’ve all become savvy to marketing ploys; anyone can make their website look great to impress us, so we don’t trust it on its own. We crave—and demand—authenticity to buy in. The “what I ordered versus what I got” trend on social media—where people show products that look nothing as advertised online—has millions of posts because it’s so relatable; we’ve all been burned by false advertising or a cool website. But glowing online reviews and thriving social media can’t easily be faked.

So, what do we prioritize? Here’s what the consumer cares about:(1)

The Average Rating: Anything with a rating under 4.3 raises suspicion; however, it’s important to do what your consumer would do—compare. If you have a rating of 4.6 but another practice has 4.8, aim for 4.9 as your goal.
Review Volume: 68% of people don’t trust a high review rating unless there are a lot of reviews.(3) Same as above: If the practice down the street has 1,500 reviews and you have 700, make it your goal to pass them.
Recent Reviews: 85% of consumers don’t think reviews older than three months are relevant, and 40% of those surveyed only cared about reviews less than two weeks old.(2)
Review Length and Content: It’s not just about ratings; people want to read reviews that mention real experiences and people.
Review Responses: 56% of customers say that a company’s response to a review changed their perspective(3) on a negative review. That’s great news— we can’t control people’s reviews, but we can control how we respond. Make sure someone is monitoring and responding to all reviews, even the positive ones.

If patient reviews are this important to our success, how do we make them a constant priority when we are juggling so many other tasks every day?

Step 1: If our culture and training empower everyone on our team to deliver consistently incredible experiences to our patients, that’s our best protection against negative reviews. Research shows that how the physician and staff made a patient feel was the leading cause of both good and negative reviews.(1)

Step 2: To maintain a constant, steady flow of positive reviews, a protocol must be established within the practice that requires all staff to be trained on how to ask patients to participate in a way that actually encourages them to write reviews.

Your takeaway for today is this: Read your reviews as if you were a potential patient and compare them to any competitor practices that patients may be researching. How do you compare and measure up on the five things people care about? Make sure your online reputation reflects how amazing your practice is in real life to nurture interest into action—patients on the schedule.

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