Manage Reviews Across athenahealth Locations | Curogram

Most health networks treat the website as their front door. Based on our internal data, 90% of new patient leads see a Google Business Profile first. For a network, that means one front door per location, and most get far less care than the homepage.

Your flagship probably looks fine. It has years of reviews and a front desk team used to hearing "I found you on Google."

Your newest satellite shows 14 reviews and a 3.6 rating. The urgent care two blocks over shows 400. Those numbers are illustrative, but the pattern is common in groups that grew by adding sites.

A patient searching "primary care near me" sees both listings side by side and picks one in a few taps. Your brand campaign, your new website, and your awards page aren't on that screen.

Nobody owns that gap. Marketing runs the brand. Operations runs schedules, staffing, and each department's setup in athenaOne. The Google profiles for all forty sites fall between those two teams, and they go stale.

Our view is that managing Google reviews for multiple athenahealth locations is an operations task with a marketing payoff. It belongs on the same report as visit counts and no-show rates.

In practice, every patient gets a review request after every completed visit, and each location's rating is tracked on its own with a named owner.

With that in place, review volume follows patient volume, site by site. A satellite that sees 25 patients a day no longer depends on whether a swamped medical assistant remembers to ask at checkout.

The Invisible Location

Review counts reflect two things: how long a site has been open and how often its staff ask. That usually puts the oldest, busiest office far ahead, even when a newer site's doctors are just as good.

At the flagship, a front desk lead with 12 years on the job hands out a review card at checkout. That site has had a decade to collect reviews, one at a time.

Your 18-month-old satellite runs on three people covering the desk, the phones, and check-in. The medical assistant means to mention a review.

Then two patients need to reschedule, the phone keeps ringing, and the patient walks out before anyone asks. Repeat that at most visits for a year, and you get a profile that looks empty next to its neighbors.

Network averages hide the problem. Take a flagship with 1,200 reviews at 4.7 and a satellite with 14 at 3.6 (illustrative). Blend them, and leadership sees a 4.7 that looks healthy, even though one site is barely visible.

What a Searcher Actually Compares

Google's map results put a star rating and a review count beside each name. Google's own Business Profile help page says local results rest mainly on relevance, distance, and how well-known a business is, and that more reviews and better ratings can help a local ranking. A thin profile ranks lower, and it looks weaker when it does show up.

Two nearby listings might look like this to a patient searching for care (illustrative figures):

The patient taps the urgent care. That tap opens hours, directions, and a call button, so the booking can start right there. Any brand ad they saw last week isn't part of that choice, and neither is the award listed on your website.

A Weak Profile in the Neighborhood You Chose

You opened the satellite for a reason. Maybe it was a growing suburb, a gap in primary care, or a new housing tract. The people in that zip code are the ones most likely to search for care nearby, and the profile they meet has 14 reviews.

A stale profile also keeps old complaints in view. Take a one-star review about a 40-minute wait, posted last spring and never answered. With no newer reviews, it's one of the few things a stranger can read about that office.

What a Few Lost Searches Add Up To

Distance is fixed once the lease is signed. Review count and rating can change every week. That makes reviews the part of local SEO health network locations can actually move.

The cost of a weak profile is hard to see because it never shows up in athenaOne. A patient who picks the neighbor never books, so there's no canceled slot or no-show to flag.

As an illustration, say two searchers a week choose the urgent care over your satellite. Over a year, that's 104 new patients who never get a chart, a follow-up, or a referral inside your network.

Forty Profiles With No Owner

Ask who manages the Google profile for your third-busiest satellite, and you may get a pause. Access often sits with whoever built the profile.

Sometimes that's an office manager who left years ago and used a personal Gmail account. Getting it back means filing a request through Google and waiting.

Other drift piles up too. Say a satellite moves to a new suite, but its profile still lists the old one. Or a department gets renamed in athenaOne, and the Google listing keeps the old name, so patients see two names for one office.

Ownership in a multi-site group usually splits like this:

Marketing reports on campaign clicks. Operations reports on visits and no-shows. Neither report tracks the satellite clinic review gap, so it grows every month without anyone being measured on it.

The Network Reputation Desk

A reputation desk can be one coordinator or a small team. Its job is network Google Business Profile management, with every location handled in one queue under one set of rules. A typical week covers four tasks:

1. Read every new review across all sites, sorted by location.
2. Reply to each one, or send it to the right regional manager for approval.
3. Flag any site whose review count has stalled or whose rating has dipped.
4. Confirm that each profile's hours, phone number, and access list are current.

Without a shared dashboard, step one alone means logging in to forty separate profiles.

Setting Up the Desk in the First Month

Most of the setup is cleanup. A practical order looks like this:

1. List every athenaOne department and match it to exactly one Google profile.
2. Recover owner access for any profile held by a former employee.
3. Choose who replies: the central desk, regional managers, or both.
4. Write a short set of approved replies that never confirm someone is a patient.
5. Turn on review requests at the weakest sites first, then add the rest.

Step one often turns up surprises, such as two profiles for one clinic or a closed site that still appears on Maps. Fix those before requests go out, or new reviews will split across the wrong pages.

Requests That Follow Real Visits

Volume comes from asking, so the ask can't depend on memory. Curogram sends review requests based on appointment activity in athenaOne. When a visit is completed, the patient gets a short text with a link to the Google profile for the location where they were seen.

A sample message, using a made-up clinic name:

"Thanks for visiting Oakridge Family Medicine today. Would you share how your visit went on Google? [link] Reply STOP to opt out."

Because a completed visit triggers the text, athenaOne habits matter. If a site leaves visits open instead of checking patients out, the request never fires.

Volume scales with each site's traffic. A site with 30 visits a day sends 30 requests, and a site with 12 sends 12. The request goes out the same day, while the visit is still fresh. Nobody at the front desk has to fit it into a crowded checkout.

Rules Every Request Has to Follow

Every patient gets the same ask, however the visit went. Google's review policy bars businesses from asking only happy customers for reviews. The FTC's guide for marketers on soliciting reviews warns against the same practice, often called review gating.

Texts and replies also stay free of health details. In June 2023, HHS's Office for Civil Rights settled with Manasa Health Center, a New Jersey psychiatric practice, for $30,000. Investigators found the practice had disclosed health information about four patients while replying to negative Google reviews.

A safe reply to a harsh review stays general. For example:

"Thank you for sharing this. We'd like to learn more, so please call our office manager at [number]."

It doesn't mention a visit, a provider, or a diagnosis.

Consent matters too. Texts should reach only patients who've agreed to get messages from you. Those three rules define the kind of automated review requests athenahealth groups can run at scale without creating a compliance problem.

Giving Every Rating an Owner

Per-location dashboards put each site under a named person. A regional manager over six clinics sees those six, and leadership sees all forty, ranked. When one site dips, its manager sees the drop that same week.

A per-location rating dashboard enterprise leaders can scan before the monthly meeting puts the five weakest sites at the top. From there, the rating works as a reputation KPI leadership tracks next to visit volume and no-show rate. Some networks set a floor for every site, such as 4.5 stars and 100 reviews (an illustrative target).

Curogram Highlight: Automated Review Requests Across athenaOne Departments

Automated Review Requests give each of your locations its own steady flow of Google reviews. Requests key off appointment activity in athenaOne, so a completed visit leads to one text. That text links to the Google profile for the site where the patient was seen.

Setup starts with a map of your network, where each athenaOne department is paired with its own Google Business Profile. A patient seen at your Elm Street clinic gets a link to the Elm Street page. Any review they leave counts toward Elm Street's standing in its own neighborhood.

From there, the feature covers the rest of the desk's work:

• Request pace is set per location, so a new site can ask after every visit while a flagship runs lighter.
• Every patient gets the same ask, and the message carries no health details.
• One dashboard shows new reviews, ratings, and reply status for every site, with a network view for leadership.
• Replies can come from a central desk or from regional managers, with an approval step before anything posts.
• Consent tracking is built in, so each text goes only to patients who agreed to receive messages.

Curogram is HIPAA-compliant. Groups often use it for appointment reminders and two-way texting too. Review requests run on that same platform, so staff don't need a separate tool or login for reviews.

The payoff shows up in the numbers leadership already reads. Based on our internal data, one multi-location group added 1,064 five-star reviews in three months with automated requests running. For an athenahealth network, the per-location campaign settings decide where that growth goes, starting with your lowest-volume sites.

Conclusion: Never Print the List Again

A new patient choosing between your satellite and the urgent care two blocks over makes that choice on a map. Your athenaOne data already records every visit at every department. Those visits can build the review count that patient reads before booking.

Most networks leave that to chance. The flagship collects reviews because a veteran staffer asks, and the satellites collect almost none.

We think each location's Google rating deserves the same treatment as its visit volume. It needs an owner, a target, and a line on the monthly report leadership reads. If a site's review count hasn't grown in 30 days, someone should be able to say why.

That work sits with a desk running one dashboard for the whole network. Requests go to every patient after every completed visit, with no screening and no health details. Regional managers see their own sites, and leadership sees all of them ranked from weakest to strongest.

Start with a quick check tonight. Search Google for your three lowest-volume locations, the way a new patient in each neighborhood would. Write down each rating, each review count, and the date of each newest review.

Those numbers are the first thing new patients in those neighborhoods learn about you. Compare them with the closest competitor on the same map, and you'll have your starting gap for each site.

Schedule a demo with Curogram, and we'll audit the review gap across your locations. We'll also project 90-day review volume for each site from your real visit counts in athenaOne.

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