Pay Up—or Risk Your Reputation
This account was submitted by a healthcare provider and de-identified before publication. Details that could identify a patient or practice have been removed, and it is shared with the provider’s consent.
We ended up being able to get this specific removed after a lot of back-and-forth, but that was just one situation. This has occurred multiple times over the past seven years. A patient will have some stress about what they paid for their procedure or feel that someone didn’t pamper them or cater to them enough and they will threaten to give us a one star review and say terrible things about our practice. We have no recourse, except to give them whatever amount of money they’re asking for because as a small family owned business, all it takes is for a couple reviews to completely tank you in Google. Who is to say that there won’t be a significant amount more of these things that will put us out of business.
What actually happened with this patient is that she no call / no showed eight times at the last minute and so we blocked her from being able to book an appointment online. Additionally, to book another appointment, she needed to put a deposit down which infuriated her. She was unhappy with the situation so she wrote two different reviews under two different profiles that sounded very much alike and dropped our rating. We had no other recourse than to pay her the money she was asking for.
Our poor nurse practitioners are terrified that their reputation will be tarnished irreversibly by patients doing this for cash payouts. We are completely handcuffed by HIPAA in this situation.
We spoke with the patient multiple times and tried to resolve it. At a certain point her friend who also comes to the practice, saw the profile and review and spoke to the patient on our behalf. A refund for the patient’s last procedure was given and she was discharged from our practice.