Ask ten questions a patient would ask, put each one to three or four AI assistants, copy the answers into a sheet, and mark every fact that does not match your own records. Then fix the sources the assistants read, because you cannot edit the assistant. The whole check takes about 45 minutes, and you can repeat it monthly.
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In a 2026 survey of 992 patients, a review-software vendor called rater8 found that 47% had used AI to research healthcare providers. A vendor has a reason to make AI look important, so treat that as a direction. I have not measured how often assistants get orthopedic details wrong, and nobody has shown me a figure I trust. That is why the check below starts with your own practice and your own facts.
Step 1: write down the facts you want repeated
Before you ask anything, write one plain list: practice name, each address, each phone number, hours for the office and for walk-in care, the insurance plans you accept, each surgeon’s name and what they treat, and if you are taking new patients. The list is your answer key. If you cannot agree on it among yourselves, an assistant has no chance.
Step 2: the ten prompts
Use the words a patient would use, with your own city in place of the brackets.
- Best orthopedic surgeon for knee replacement in [city]
- Orthopedic walk-in clinic open Saturday in [city]
- Who treats a torn rotator cuff near [city]
- Phone number for [your practice name]
- Does [your practice name] take [a plan you accept]
- Is [a surgeon’s name] taking new patients
- Reviews of [your practice name]
- Orthopedic urgent care in [city] open now
- Outpatient hip replacement in [city]
- Second opinion before spine surgery in [city]
Run each prompt twice in each assistant. Answers change from run to run and from place to place, so one run proves little.
Step 3: score what comes back
Make a sheet with one row per answer and these columns: assistant, prompt, were you named, name correct, address correct, phone correct, hours correct, insurance correct, surgeon correct, and the exact sentence that was wrong. Copy the wrong sentence word for word, because the exact wording is what lets you trace the error back to its source.
Do not score opinions such as “best”. Score only facts you can check against the list from Step 1.
⚡ 2-minute scorecard · instant result
Is your orthopedic practice website turning searches into booked consults?
Answer 5 quick questions. Get your score + the top fixes, free.
1. Can a new patient request an appointment from a phone in under a minute?
2. Is every phone number on your site a tap-to-call link?
3. Do your procedure pages name the surgeons who perform them and show patient reviews?
4. Does each office have its own page with hours, phone and the surgeons who work there?
5. Do you track new-patient requests from the first click to a kept consult?
Step 4: trace each error to a source
Assistants lean on pages that other people publish about you. Common ones are hospital physician finders, review and directory sites, price-comparison pages, old versions of your own site, and the federal provider registry. When I built the registry count for five Southern Oregon cities, 36 of 58 orthopaedic surgeon records had not been updated in over three years, which I describe in my registry study. A stale record is not proof of a wrong answer. It is a place where one could start.
For each wrong sentence, ask where that fact could have come from, then open that source and look.
Step 5: fix in this order
- The registry record for each surgeon. The rule asks for changes within 30 days.
- Your Google listing. My notes on the Google Business Profile list what to check.
- The contact, hours and insurance pages on your own website, written in the same format as the listing.
- Hospital finders where you hold privileges. They are separate profiles and they drift.
- Directories and review sites, starting with the ones that rank when you search your own name.
Change the facts, not the assistants. Do not try to trick them, and do not buy or write reviews to push an answer around.
Step 6: repeat on a schedule
Run the same ten prompts once a month for three months. Keep every sheet. If an error persists after its source is fixed, note it and move on, because some tools refresh slowly. If a fixed fact starts coming back right, you have a result you can show your partners.
What this check cannot tell you
It cannot tell you how many patients an assistant sends you. It cannot rank you above a competitor, and I do not promise any ranking. It also cannot see what each patient’s own assistant is told. It shows if your basic facts are consistent across the places an assistant is likely to read, and that is worth knowing before you spend on anything else.
If you would like me to run the check for your practice, the scorecard on this page takes about two minutes and you see your score straight away. You can also read my Southern Oregon overview or book a free 30-minute call. I am Mandeep Singh, founder of Sprout Sage Solutions. I work from India, I have spent over ten years in digital marketing and I have built 450 websites.
This is a marketing guide. It is not legal, billing or medical advice.
