Setting up reputation monitoring for a clinic

What monitoring is for in a clinic#

A clinic does not need to know everything said about it online. It needs to know three things early: when a patient has posted a complaint that deserves a response and a fix; when a news item, video or forum thread has made a claim about a practitioner or a procedure that is wrong; and when someone is using the clinic's or a doctor's name to offer consultations, sell medicines or collect money. Everything else — the five-star reviews, the directory listings, the passing mentions — is context.

Monitoring is the discipline of checking for those three things on a schedule, with the same method each time, so that nothing important waits months to be discovered and nothing trivial consumes the practice manager's morning. This guide walks through a set-up for a single-site clinic with two or three practitioners, and notes where a small hospital differs. The same steps apply to dental, physiotherapy, diagnostic and AYUSH practices, with their own councils' rules in place of the National Medical Commission's.

Two constraints sit over the whole exercise. Patient confidentiality applies to every public word a clinic writes, including replies to reviews. And the NMC's Guidelines on Ethical Advertising and Public Communication, notified on 6 October 2026, state that registered medical practitioners shall not request or share patient testimonials, recommendations, endorsements or reviews for professional promotion, prohibit manipulating reviews or ratings, and require practitioners' electronic posts to carry their name, qualifications and registration number. Monitoring is for understanding and responding; it is not a review-collection programme, and Spy Monk has no such feature.

This guide is general information and not legal advice or professional-conduct advice. Questions about the regulations, patient data or a specific complaint should go to a qualified professional.

Step one: decide what you are monitoring#

Start with entities — the things that have a reputation. For a typical clinic that means the clinic itself and each practitioner, as separate entities, because a patient complaint about waiting times attaches to the clinic while an allegation about treatment attaches to the doctor. On the Free plan you have one entity; Starter allows one; Pro allows three; Business allows ten. A two-doctor clinic therefore fits comfortably on Pro with the clinic and both practitioners.

For each entity, write down the aliases people actually use. For the clinic: the trading name, any former name, the name of the building or locality it is known by, and Hindi or regional spellings. For a practitioner: the full name, the name with and without "Dr", common misspellings, initials, and the speciality people pair with the name ("Dr Mehta cardiologist"). Add the city or locality as the location, and the speciality as the category. These aliases drive both the audit and the monitoring, and a few minutes here saves weeks of noise.

Record authority. The practitioner must be the account holder or must authorise the clinic to monitor their name; keep that consent in the workspace. Do not add patients, former staff or competitors as entities — the acceptable use policy prohibits profiling private individuals, and personal data of individuals is governed by the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

Step two: run the baseline audit and read the coverage table first#

Before monitoring, run the free audit for each entity. It queries the sources available to the deployment — public news, and web search and YouTube where the provider is enabled — de-duplicates the results by URL, classifies each finding by topic, AI-estimated sentiment and risk, and produces a Reputation Health Index from a fixed, published formula.

Read the coverage table before the score. It lists each source adapter as covered, unavailable, not connected or demo, with a reason. For a clinic today the review adapter will show not connected: reading reviews directly from your Google Business Profile needs the Phase 2 connector, so review pages reach you only through search results where the search provider is enabled, or when you add a review URL yourself. Knowing this on day one means the practice manager does not assume Spy Monk is reading every Google review when it is not.

Keep the PDF. It is your dated baseline, and it carries the same coverage table, so limitations travel with the document when you show it to a partner or an adviser.

Step three: build the monitoring project#

Create one monitoring project for the clinic (and, on Pro, one per practitioner if their public exposure justifies it). Keywords are the terms each run searches for; on Starter you have ten per project, on Pro twenty-five. A sensible set for a clinic:

• the clinic name and its two or three most common variants;
• each practitioner's name as patients write it;
• the locality or landmark the clinic is identified by;
• the one or two procedures or services the clinic is known for, paired with the locality;
• Hindi spellings of the clinic and the doctors' names.

Exclusions are as important as keywords. If a practitioner shares a name with a politician in another state or a doctor in another city, add the distinguishing words of the namesake — their city, their field — as exclusions. If the clinic's name is a common word, pair it with the locality rather than monitoring the bare word. Expect to tune this after the first two or three runs; the mentions workspace shows you what was caught, and muting a namesake's mention teaches you which exclusion to add.

Competitor names can be recorded on the project, but they are not scanned by themselves. Comparison in Spy Monk runs between entities in your workspace — for a clinic, usually the clinic against its own past — in Compare.

Step four: choose the schedule and understand credits#

Starter runs weekly; Pro and Business can run daily; any plan can start a manual run. Weekly is enough for most single-site clinics. Daily suits a practice with constant public exposure — a well-known specialist, a clinic that has recently been in the news, or one running a public-health campaign — and is worth switching on for a few weeks around any incident.

Each run uses one scan credit. Plans include a monthly allowance — ten on Starter, forty on Pro — and extra credits can be bought. If a scheduled run finds no credits, Spy Monk records that it was skipped, notifies you and runs when credits are available; it does not silently stop. Manual runs debit a credit immediately. Watch the credit balance on the project card for the first month and adjust the plan or schedule to match.

Step five: assign roles and a reader#

Monitoring only helps if a named person reads the workspace. In a clinic that is usually the practice manager or front-office lead, who should be an analyst: able to triage mentions, tag, mute, archive, open cases and draft replies, but not to approve anything public. The practitioner or clinic owner should be an admin or owner: the person who approves a reply, a correction request or a platform report before it leaves. If the clinic uses a lawyer for a matter, invite them as a viewer. Pro includes five seats.

Agree what "reading the workspace" means: a fixed time each week (or each morning on a daily schedule) to filter to new mentions, read anything marked high risk at its source, tag what matters, mute what does not, and open a case for anything that needs a reply or a record. Set notification preferences so the analyst sees in-app notifications for new mentions and the approver receives the email alerts, which Spy Monk sends only for mentions assessed as high risk.

Remember what archiving is. Archiving or muting hides a mention inside Spy Monk so your views stay clean. It does nothing to the original page, and the product will never describe it otherwise.

Step six: agree the confidentiality rule before the first alert#

The first negative review will arrive, probably at an inconvenient hour, and the reply will be written faster than it should be. Decide the rules now, in writing, in the case notes:

• No confirmation that a reviewer was a patient, and no treatment, diagnosis or billing details in any public reply.
• Every reply thanks, acknowledges the experience, and offers a named private contact; nothing more.
• No requests to patients to post, edit or remove reviews; no incentives; no sharing of reviews or testimonials for promotion — the NMC guidelines prohibit these and treat rating manipulation as a violation with graded penalties.
• No claims about results, superiority or cures in replies.
• Any post by a practitioner carries their name, qualifications and registration number, as the guidelines require.
• Every reply and every report is approved by the practitioner or owner before it is posted, through the approval gate.

DRS's review clarification template, in English and Hindi, follows these rules. The approval step is what makes them hold.

Step seven: from mention to case, and what to do with each kind#

A patient complaint becomes a negative-review case: snapshot the review, attach an internal reference (never the patient file), draft the reply from the template, get it approved, post it through the platform, and resolve the matter privately. Report the review to the platform only if it breaks a published policy — a conflict of interest, off-topic content, personal information — not because it is harsh. The guide on responding to a negative Google review covers the reply in detail.

An inaccurate news item or video about a procedure or a practitioner becomes a news or video case: isolate the statement, attach the clinical or factual record that answers it (anonymised), and prepare a correction request for the publisher's channel after approval. See News and media fact-verification.

An impostor profile offering consultations or medicines in a doctor's name becomes an urgent impersonation case: preserve, report through the platform's impersonation form with the practitioner's registration proof, and report at cybercrime.gov.in — impersonating a medical practitioner endangers patients. Platforms must act on impersonation complaints within two hours under the IT Rules 2021. See the first 48 hours guide.

A threat to publish allegations unless fees are refunded becomes a blackmail case: do not pay, preserve the messages, report at cybercrime.gov.in or call 1930, and involve a qualified professional. See Crisis and blackmail response.

Step eight: review the trend monthly#

Once a month, open Reports. The Health Index trend, sentiment distribution and source split show whether the picture is changing within the sources covered, and the case view shows how many review cases were resolved, not just opened. Export the PDF for the partners' meeting. If the trend is flat and the workspace is quiet, that is a result too: the clinic knows what is being said and has a record to prove it.

When to consult a professional#

This guide is general information and not legal advice. Consult a qualified lawyer, and where relevant your medical council, before replying when a review alleges negligence or a crime; when a news report makes serious clinical allegations; when a patient's personal data has been exposed; when anyone demands money in connection with a post; and before any legal notice or complaint. Spy Monk organises the evidence and the timeline; the judgement belongs to the practitioner and their advisers.