Practice reputation read

What is your rating quietly costing you?

Satisfied patients rarely leave reviews, so a practice’s public rating is mostly a sample of the frustrated few — and prospective patients filter on it before they ever pick up the phone. Enter your numbers to see that gap in dollars, and what it takes to close it. Defaults model an average family practice.

Your practice · the vitals
Providers
1 provider × 40 = 40 prospective patients / month
Reputation
Slider caps at 600; type any number for more.
Economics & pace
Your real number. The lower bound is built from this.
Everyone who sees your rating while deciding. The upper bound is built from this.
The estimated bleed
$23,625$42,525

per year, as a range. Not a point estimate, because the honest evidence does not support one.

13.5 to 24.3 new patients a year, at $1,750 of lifetime revenue each

The band is the range a Harvard Business School study actually measured — five to nine percent of demand per full star, identified by comparing businesses that landed just above and just below a rounding threshold. Your 0.9★ gap is worth that much of the new patients you already see. Most vendors quote you a single dramatic number instead. There isn’t one. There is a range, and this is it.

Prospects your rating clears nowThe gap you’re leaving

At 3.6★, 22% of patients say your rating clears their personal minimum; at 4.5★ that becomes 92%. On the numbers you entered, that is about 27.9 people a month who say your rating would stop them.

We do not put a dollar figure on that line, because patients report far stricter standards than they act on. Taken literally, these thresholds say a practice at 2.5★ would see almost no new patients at all — which every working practice at 2.5★ disproves by continuing to exist. It shows you the mechanism. The money above comes from what was measured, not what was reported.

3.6today
4.5target
What recovery takes — the arithmetic
Your badge first moves after
2
new 5★ reviews to display 3.7★ — it ticks up long before the average does.
To display your target
62
new 5★ reviews to display 4.5★.
At your review pace, that's
3.1
months of asking every patient.
The honest read
A season of asking everyone.
[+] Where these numbers come from

Why a range and not a number. The best-identified research on this question produces a range, not a point. Reporting the midpoint would imply a precision the evidence does not have, and reporting the top of it would be marketing.

The screening bar shows the mechanism: the cumulative share of patients whose self-reported minimum acceptable rating your rating clears. It is built from the RepuGen 2025 Patient Review Survey (1,212 patients), in which 78% report requiring four stars or better. We show it and deliberately do not price it, because stated thresholds are aspirational: taken literally they would predict that a practice at 2.5★ sees virtually no new patients, and practices at 2.5★ plainly do.

The dollar band comes from causal research on what rating changes actually do to demand. Luca (Harvard Business School) used the rounding thresholds on Yelp as a natural experiment and found one full star moves revenue 5–9%, with independent businesses affected more than chains. In healthcare specifically, AJMC found a single 1-star review cut new patient volume 2.3–2.6% for at least sixteen weeks. The band you see is Luca’s 5–9% range applied to the new patients you already report seeing, which is why that input matters more than any other on this page.

Both ends are valued at patient lifetime revenue (revenue per year × years retained) and scale with provider count. Luca’s estimate comes from restaurants rather than clinics, and independent businesses showed larger effects than chains — an independent practice is the closer analogue, which is one reason the true figure may sit toward the upper end. The recovery counts on the left are not estimates at all: they are exact arithmetic, assuming new reviews average five stars and your displayed badge rounds to one decimal.

Read this as a directional estimate, not a promise. Defaults model an average family practice; results vary by specialty, market, and practice. The band is wide because the underlying evidence is genuinely uncertain, and a narrower number would be false precision. Nothing here guarantees a rating, a timeline, or revenue — no honest system can. What it shows is the shape of a gap that is usually invisible, and the arithmetic of closing it.

See a real read of your actual practice.

This is the sketch. The real one is an on-site walkthrough, mystery-patient calls, and your own numbers — done by one person who builds it, runs it, and reads it back. M.A., Industrial & Organizational Psychology.

Request the walkthrough
About this read

What these numbers mean, and what they do not.

A calculator that will not explain its own assumptions is a sales tool wearing a lab coat. Here are ours.

[+]

Do you store the numbers I just typed?

No. This tool runs entirely inside your browser. Nothing you enter is transmitted, saved, or visible to us — there is no account, no submission, and no record that you used it at all. Close the tab and the numbers are gone. That is a deliberate choice for a page asking a practice about its weakest metric.

[+]

Why is the estimate a range instead of a number?

Because the underlying research produces a range. The best-identified study of this question compared businesses that landed just above and just below a rating rounding threshold, and found one full star was worth five to nine percent of demand. Reporting the midpoint would imply a precision nobody has, and reporting the top of it would be marketing. So the tool shows the band it was actually given.

[+]

Patients say they require four stars. Why isn't the estimate far larger?

Because what patients report and what patients do are different, and the gap is roughly a factor of ten. Survey data has 78% of patients saying they require four stars or better — taken literally, that predicts a practice at 2.5 stars would see almost no new patients at all, and practices at 2.5 stars plainly keep seeing them. The screening bar on this page shows those stated thresholds, because they are the mechanism and they are real directionally. The dollar figures come from studies that measured actual behaviour instead, which is the more conservative and more defensible source.

[+]

How much should I trust the dollar figures themselves?

Trust the arithmetic completely and the dollars directionally. Counting the five-star reviews needed to move a rounded badge is exact — it is arithmetic, not modelling. The dollar figures are not exact: they rest on published research applied to the numbers you entered for volume, revenue, and retention, and they move a great deal when those inputs move. That sensitivity is worth watching, because it tells you which assumption your estimated loss actually depends on.

[+]

Why does the badge move so much sooner than my average?

Because the badge is rounded and the average is not. Google displays one decimal, so the number patients see can tick up while the true average is still crawling. That is why the read reports the first move separately from the full climb — the figure a prospective patient sees can change within weeks even when the underlying average is a long project.

[+]

Won’t asking every patient produce more bad reviews too?

Some, yes, and any tool that does not tell you so is selling. What changes is representativeness. Today your public rating is drawn almost entirely from people motivated enough by frustration to post; asking everyone adds the satisfied majority who never would have. You will collect some negative reviews you would not otherwise have received, and considerably more positive ones. A well-built system also surfaces bad experiences to the practice first, which is what lets you address something before it hardens into a public review.

[+]

Is asking patients for reviews against Google’s rules?

Asking is not. What the policies prohibit is incentivizing reviews, buying them, and soliciting selectively so that only satisfied customers get invited. Asking every patient, offering nothing in exchange, and leaving entirely to them what they write sits squarely inside the rules. The line is not between asking and not asking. It is between inviting everyone and filtering who gets invited.

[+]

My rating is already high. Is there anything here for me?

Yes, and the arithmetic shows it. A strong average is fragile in one specific direction: the fewer reviews it rests on, the faster a handful of bad ones drags the displayed number down. A practice at 4.9 with a thin review count is a few unrecovered bad afternoons away from displaying 4.8. Set the target to your current rating and the read turns into a defense calculation instead of a recovery one.

[+]

What counts as “new patients who look you up online”?

Prospective patients who see your rating before they decide — someone searching your specialty nearby, someone checking you after a referral, someone comparing two practices their insurance covers. Not your existing patients, and not everyone who walks through the door. If you are unsure, estimate low. The read is more useful when it is conservative.

[+]

What does the real version of this look like?

A walkthrough of the actual operation instead of a slider: the phones, the front desk, the wait, the follow-up that never went out, mystery-patient calls, and your real numbers rather than defaults — read back to you by the same person who does the work. This page is the sketch that tells you whether the real one is worth an hour of your time.