Healthgrades Reviews: How to Claim Your Profile and Respond

Healthgrades reviews are patient ratings and written comments tied to a doctor's or dentist's individual Healthgrades profile, which most practices don't control until they claim it. Claiming the profile lets you correct basic information, see new reviews as they post, and respond publicly — but you can't remove a negative review just because you disagree with it, and you can't ask Healthgrades to take it down without a specific policy violation. That makes Healthgrades different from Google in an important way: patients land on a provider's Healthgrades profile from a Google search for the provider's name, not usually from a direct visit to healthgrades.com, so an unclaimed or outdated profile is often the first impression a new patient gets. Getting Healthgrades reviews in the same inbox as Google means you're not relying on remembering to check a second site that patients see before you do. How to claim your Healthgrades profile Healthgrades generates a profile for most licensed US physicians and dentists automatically, pulled from state licensing boards and other public sources, whether or not the provider ever signs up. To claim it, search for your name or practice on healthgrades.com, select your listing, and follow the verification flow, which typically confirms your identity through your NPI number or a code sent to a practice phone line or email on file . Once claimed, you can edit your bio, education, accepted insurance, and office hours, and you get notified when a new review posts instead of finding out from a patient who mentions it at checkout. A group practice should claim the profile for every provider individually, not just the practice's main listing — Healthgrades reviews are almost always attached to a specific doctor or dentist, not the practice as a whole, so a five-doctor practice has five profiles to claim and monitor, each with its own rating. How the Healthgrades rating is calculated Healthgrades scores combine patient-submitted star ratings across several categories — things like trust, explaining conditions clearly, and scheduling ease — into an overall rating displayed on the profile, alongside the written reviews themselves . Unlike Google, Healthgrades doesn't require the reviewer to have booked through the platform, which means a profile can accumulate reviews from patients who found it purely through search, not through any appointment flow Healthgrades controls. Volume matters here the same way it does on Google: a profile with three reviews from two years ago reads as thin regardless of the star average, while a profile with a steady trickle of recent reviews reads as an active, trustworthy practice. Patients comparing providers side by side notice recency as much as the number itself. Responding to Healthgrades reviews Once your profile is claimed, you can respond publicly to reviews, and the same HIPAA constraint that applies on Google and Yelp applies here with no exceptions: a reply can never confirm that the reviewer was a patient, never reference a diagnosis or procedure, and should redirect anything specific to a phone call. "Thank you for your feedback — please contact our office directly so we can address this" works regardless of whether the review is glowing or difficult. For the full reasoning behind why even a warm, generic-sounding reply can create HIPAA exposure, see how to respond to patient reviews without violating HIPAA. You also cannot solicit reviews specifically on Healthgrades by offering anything in exchange, and review gating — asking only satisfied patients to post while routing complaints elsewhere — is both against the FTC's rule on fake and deceptive reviews (16 CFR Part 465) and against the spirit of every platform's terms, Healthgrades included. The safer approach is a single review request sent to every patient after every visit, pointed at whichever platforms you actually want to grow, with Healthgrades included in the list rather than treated as an afterthought once a year when someone remembers to check it. Common mistakes practices make with Healthgrades The most common one is simply never claiming the profile at all. Because Healthgrades auto-generates listings from public licensing data, a provider who's never logged in still has a live, public page — often with an outdated office address from a previous practice, a specialty that's technically correct but not how the provider actually markets themselves, and no bio at all. A patient who finds this version of the profile before the practice's own website gets a worse first impression than if the provider had no Healthgrades presence to find. The second common mistake is claiming it once and never returning. Accepted insurance plans change, providers move offices or leave group practices, and a profile that was accurate at claim time two years ago can quietly drift out of date without anyone noticing until a patient calls asking about insurance the practice stopped accepting months earlier. The third is treating Healthgrades reviews as lower priority than Google reviews simply because the practice doesn't check the platform as often. A negative, unanswered Healthgrades review sits in the same Google search results for the provider's name as everything else, so an unattended Healthgrades profile is visible exactly where a thin Google profile would be. What information to keep current on your profile Beyond the basics of hours and address, a Healthgrades profile benefits from a bio that actually describes how the provider practices — areas of focus, languages spoken, and approach to patient care — rather than a bare credentials list. Education and board certifications matter for patient trust but tend to be table stakes; what differentiates one profile from a competing provider's in the same specialty is usually the more human details that give a prospective patient a reason to choose this specific doctor over another with similar credentials. Accepted insurance plans are worth double-checking specifically, since this is one of the more common reasons a patient contacts a practice only to find the information was wrong — and an incorrect insurance listing creates a worse first interaction than no listing at all, because it sets an expectation the practice then has to walk back. How Healthgrades compares to other doctor review sites Healthgrades tends to carry weight specifically for provider comparison shopping — a patient choosing between three in-network cardiologists, for instance — more than for day-to-day practice reputation, where Google still dominates search visibility. For a fuller picture of where Healthgrades fits against Zocdoc, Vitals, WebMD, and RateMDs, see the best doctor and dentist review sites patients actually use. Can you remove a false Healthgrades review? Only if it violates Healthgrades' content policy — for example, if it's clearly not from an actual patient, contains another person's private information, or includes threats or hate speech. A review that's simply negative, even if you believe it's unfair, isn't grounds for removal, and disputing it publicly tends to draw more attention to the review than letting a calm, neutral reply stand on its own. Do you need a separate Healthgrades profile for each location? Healthgrades profiles are tied to individual providers and the specific office addresses where they practice, so a provider seeing patients at two locations may show up with reviews split across both, which is worth checking when you claim the profile so patient volume isn't appearing lower than it actually is at either site. Every review from Google, Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Vitals and WebMD in one inbox → Try Tailwind free. For the broader list of where patients actually leave reviews, see best doctor and dentist review sites patients actually use, and for the request side of growing your review count without gating, see how to get more patient reviews for your dental practice. Tailwind is $5 a month per tool, or $50 a month for the Full plan with every tool included — first month free, no card required.