Do reviews and online scheduling move new-patient growth?

Tested on all 249 active SGA practices, January to September 2026 against the same months of 2025. Prepared 2026-10-05 by Growth Marketing for the Nashville summit doctor deck. Sources: Power BI new patients, 28,031 Google reviews pulled on October 5, Neurality monthly exports April to September, PeerLogic January to August.

Reviews: no relationshipReview velocity, rating and one-star share show no association with new-patient growth. Rank correlation is 0.01. Reviews are a floor, not an accelerator.

Online scheduling: the one signalPractices where a fifth of new patients book online grew 8% in July to September while the rest shrank. Weak, and the arrow could point either way.

Neurality go-live: no lift yetNew patients two months after go-live moved exactly like practices without it. Too early, too small a window, or no effect. The data cannot say which.

Practices with a usable YoY

236

of 249. Thirteen have no Power BI rows.

Median NP growth, Jan to Sep

−3.4%

2026 vs 2025, per practice.

Review velocity vs growth

0.01

Spearman rank correlation. Zero is no relationship.

High online-booking third

+8.2%

Jul to Sep NP YoY, vs −3.8% for the low third.

1. Reviews do not predict growth

If more reviews brought more new patients, practices in the top review quartile would be growing faster than the bottom. They are not. The four quartiles land within two points of each other, and the ordering is random.

New-patient growth by review-velocity quartile

Median NP YoY, Jan to Sep 2026 vs 2025, 236 practices. Quartile by average Google reviews per month, Jan to Aug 2026.

Measure	Rank correlation with NP YoY	Practices	Reading
Review velocity, avg per month Jan to Aug	0.01	236	None
Reviews per 100 new patients (how well the office asks)	−0.09	236	None
Average rating, Jan to Sep	0.06	231	None
One-star share of one-plus-five-star reviews	−0.03	231	None
PeerLogic NP phone conversion, Jan to Aug	0.10	90	Weak

What this means for the deck. Most SGA listings already sit at 4.8 stars or better with hundreds of reviews, so the marginal review is not where growth comes from. The defensible argument, which the July network pull also supported, is the floor: a listing with no recent reviews or a rating under 4.5 loses patients. Frame reviews as table stakes, not as a growth lever.

2. The SGA East review outage

The September review counts carry a problem of their own. Around August 24 to 25, Google reviews stopped arriving at SGA East. 34 East practices that averaged 10 to 22 reviews a month went to zero in September, and another 36 fell more than 70%. West and Specialty were unaffected.

Not removals

Lifetime review totals on the affected listings today equal the July 12 count plus everything posted since, within a few reviews for 30 of 34. Google did not remove reviews. They stopped arriving.

One switch

Last review dates cluster on August 25 for 18 practices and August 24 for 5 more. That is a platform or vendor change, not office behavior. The sender is not yet identified.

Growth effect so far

September new patients at the review-stopped practices fell 7.7% year over year against 5.1% at East practices with normal inflow. One month, 31 against 12 practices, inside the noise.

Any September review number for an East practice in the summit dataset reflects this outage, not practice performance. The per-practice list with last review dates is in the shared dataset's Review note column.

3. Online scheduling is the one positive signal

Where online bookings make up a larger share of a practice's new patients, growth is higher. The effect is modest and the direction of cause is open, but it is the only variable in the dataset that moves with growth at all.

July to September new-patient growth by online-booking share

Median NP YoY, Jul to Sep 2026 vs 2025, 121 Neurality practices split into thirds by online NP bookings as a share of total NP. Median share 10.8%, 75th percentile 17.5%.

Two cautions before this goes on a slide. Growing practices may simply promote online booking more, so the arrow could point from growth to online share rather than the reverse. And an online booking can replace a phone booking rather than add to it. The rank correlation is 0.12 to 0.19, which is weak but consistent in direction across the whole range.

4. Neurality go-live has not moved new patients yet

Practices with Neurality run −2.5% against −4.0% without it, but that gap reflects which practices were chosen for rollout. The cleaner test compares each practice's new patients in the two months after go-live with the two months before, adjusted for the same months in 2025, against practices that never went live.

33 go-live practices

−0.1 pts

Change in post-vs-pre NP ratio beyond the 2025 seasonal pattern.

224 never-live control windows

−0.1 pts

Identical. No detectable lift within two months.

Beat their 2025 pattern

48%

of go-live practices, against 50% of controls.

What Neurality does change: the phone metrics

The same before-and-after test on PeerLogic shows a clear effect. After go-live PeerLogic sees far fewer missed calls, scores fewer new-patient intent calls, and the remaining calls convert better.

PeerLogic metric, after minus before go-live	Neurality go-live (30)	Never-live control (1,067 windows)
Missed-call percentage	−8.1 pts	+0.6
New-patient intent calls per month	−11	−6
New-patient conversion	+10.5 pts	−1.3
Calls per month	−17	−47

Implication: a PeerLogic conversion lift after a Neurality go-live is the tool, not the front desk. Whether PeerLogic scores the calls Neurality answers, and whether the agent's bookings count as successes, is an open question with PeerLogic.

5. What would actually prove it

A monthly panel, not a snapshot. Reviews, online-booking share and new patients by practice by month over twelve or more months, with one- to three-month lags. The Railway review tables and the monthly review refresh produce exactly this by spring.
The East outage as a natural experiment. If reviews drive new patients, the 34 stopped practices should fall behind the 12 normal East practices over October to December. We will know by January.
Incremental, not substituted, online bookings. Compare phone-booked plus online-booked new patients before and after the online scheduler goes live, not online share alone.

6. Sources and method

Input	Source	Coverage	Caveat
New patients	Power BI via the SGA Data MCP, pulled 2026-10-05	236 of 249	Thirteen practices have no Power BI rows, mostly East four-wall offices that roll up to a parent.
Google reviews	Every review on each listing, October 2025 to October 5 2026, counted by post date	249	Four code pairs share one listing. East September is the outage above.
Neurality	Monthly analytics exports April to September; web-scheduler new-patient bookings July to September	156 to 178	Rollout began April 2026. Online share only exists for July to September.
PeerLogic	Monthly per-extension export, January to August 2026, pooled	91	West plus nine East only. Definitions changed in June and September 2025, so no 2025 comparison.

Growth is Jan to Sep 2026 against Jan to Sep 2025 per practice, excluding openings and closures. Correlations are Spearman rank. Quartile and third splits report the median within each group. The full per-practice dataset is the Sarah Summit Practice Dataset workbook, built 2026-10-05.