You Can't Control What a Patient Writes. You Can Control the Ask.

Reviews are consistently a hot topic with all practices, especially now that we know what an important role they play with Chat and Ai searches. But, they are not a marketing checkbox that “we need to get to, eventually”. They are an opportunity to publicly showcase how many lives we change every day, to earn trust with new patients before they ever walk through the door.

Ninety-seven percent of consumers read reviews online before choosing a local business, and forty-one percent now say they always read them – up from twenty-nine percent a year ago, according to BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey. Consumers are also expecting higher star ratings and fresher reviews than they used to.

For a medical or aesthetic practice, that carries extra weight. Choosing a surgeon isn't a one-and-done decision. It's endless research, comparison, consultations, a second look, then a third or sometimes more, before anyone commits. Patients carry uncertainty and emotional baggage when searching for a provider. We can do an incredible job in the consultation process and patients still want reassurance from other patients that they are making a sound decision by choosing you. 

Reviews matter for AI search now too – BrightLocal found AI tools like ChatGPT have surged into third place as a source for local business recommendations. But they also matter for something more basic. After someone calls a practice and comes in for a consultation, they still go back to the website. They still go back to the reviews. A framed diploma says a provider is qualified. A hundred people describing their own outcome shows what qualified actually looks like – from someone who walked into your practice scared and unsure before them.

So reviews matter. You knew that part. The real question is how you consistently get honest, well-rounded ones.

That starts with the provider, right after a patient says some version of "you changed my life."

The first mention of a review is not a line for a coordinator or our front desk team. It belongs to the provider. As soon as a patient says something like "you changed my life", or “wow, I really look/feel amazing now” – the provider needs to learn this very easy response: "Well, I’m so happy to have helped and glad that you chose me and my team. I know there are a lot of surgeons(injectors/esties) out there you could have chosen from. Would you mind sharing your experience with other patients who are also looking for a provider?" We don’t ask “will you leave us a review”. The verbiage “do you mind sharing your experience with other patients looking for a provider” puts them in the chair of helping others that are just like them.

Only after that does the rest of the team pick it up. Your process should guarantee that the first ask already happened with the provider. At checkout, the front desk reinforces it. The link goes out later that same day.

I dug into this exact workflow on a recent episode of Practiceland: Not Your Doctor's Podcast with Becky Godsey, COO of Denver Plastic Surgery and Aesthetics, and we landed in the same place. As Becky put it: "When a PA or a nurse asks, a patient will say sure, sure, okay, I'll get to that. But when the surgeon looks a patient in the eye and asks for a review personally, it's an easy yes, and it's a better review."

That tracks with everything I've seen across 10,000+ reviews across the practices with which I work. If we’ve done our job right, patients feel indebted to providers for the experience and outcomes they achieve. When the ask comes from the provider first, it’s more likely that the patient follows through and provides the feedback.  Everyone downstream is just following through on something that started with the provider. 

For non-surgical patients – Botox, filler, laser – an automated text later the same day works well to collect reviews, and the timing isn't a guess. Have it go out at 7 p.m. the night of the appointment, use your EMR to send these messages. That's usually the point in the evening when patients are relaxed enough to actually sit down and write something while it's still fresh. Becky explains her research and results in the episode of Practiceland linked above.

Becky's practice builds a cap into the system too, so a patient coming in regularly for a hydrafacial or a laser treatment only gets that text once every ninety days, maximum. She learned that the hard way with other automated messages: over-communicate, and patients unsubscribe.

Surgical patients don't get an automated text at all. While I'm not against automation across the board — I just don't want this important asset for your practice treated the same way for every patient. You’ve got less surgical patients than those coming in for botox. Surgery is a larger investment from the patient, and a larger transformation. We need a real message, not a template. Also, the review ask and nudge usually doesn't come until at least a month or two into recovery when the patient is progressing through their healing and starting to see their amazing results.

I understand the appeal of a QR code at checkout or a sign by the register. I'd resist it anyway, for two reasons.

The first is a hard line: to be safe, don't trade anything for a review. The FTC's 2024 rule on consumer reviews and testimonials (16 CFR Part 465), effective October 2024, makes it an unfair or deceptive practice to offer compensation or incentives conditioned — expressly or by implication — on a review expressing a particular sentiment. Disclosing the incentive doesn't cure it, and penalties run to five figures per violation. In practice, the line between "leave us a review" and "leave us a good review" gets blurry fast at a front desk, so the safest policy is to incentivize nothing.

The second is about quality, and it's the reason I'd skip the QR code even where nothing improper is happening. A review collected in a rush at the front desk, on the practice's Wi-Fi, with a staff member standing there, is rarely as substantive as one a patient writes at home on their own time. It's also the kind of clustered, same-location, immediately-post-visit pattern that reviews platforms like Google tends to scrutinize through geotagging. A review asked for honestly and written later holds up better — as a review, and as something that stays posted.

One more habit worth stealing, and this one I picked up the same way you might have – by listening. My co-host Blake dropped an episode with Marie Olesen, CEO of La Jolla Cosmetic Surgery Centre, about requesting reviews from all patients as opposed to only asking patients that we thought would leave a good review. At time of publishing this article they have nearly 700 reviews and a 4.9 star rating! Ask everybody, and the picture that comes back looks a lot more like reality.

Good reviews aren't something a practice generates. They're something a practice earns by getting the patient experience and outcomes right, consistently, for every patient – not just the ones who happen to be easy.

You can't control what a patient writes, or whether they write anything at all. You can control the ask.

oOo