Healthgrades Reputation Management

A Healthgrades provider rating comes from the Patient Satisfaction Survey: patients rate several 1-to-5 star dimensions of their visit — things like ease of scheduling, office environment, staff friendliness, and how well the provider explained their condition — and can optionally add a written comment of up to 500 characters. Writing a comment is optional; leaving only star ratings is common, and those star-only submissions count toward the published rating immediately, even though they never appear as visible text on the profile.

That gap matters. The number a visitor sees is drawn from every submitted survey, not just the ones with written text attached — so a calculator built only from the visible written reviews would be estimating off an incomplete input set, not reproducing the actual math. That’s a meaningfully different situation from a platform where every rating comes with visible text.

Every submission — star-only or written — has to clear verification first: the patient provides an email address and agrees to Healthgrades’ User Agreement, Editorial Policy, and Privacy Policy affirming the account is accurate, truthful, and a first-hand experience. Submissions are then screened by automated software around the clock and audited by Healthgrades’ editorial team before anything publishes.