Before Patients Find You, AI Already Has: What Health Systems Must Do Now
By Brian Wynne, SVP of Growth, NRC Health
Before a patient ever visits your website, calls your contact center, or walks through your doors, something else has already met them first.
AI.
As I shared during our recent NRC Health webcast with Damian Rollison, Senior Director of Market Insights at SOCi, and Carrie Liken, Senior Account Executive at Snowflake: Before a patient ever makes contact with your organization, AI has already formed an opinion about your brand and is serving it up to your would-be customers.
This is not a futuristic idea. It’s happening right now.
Search engines, review platforms, Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity—these systems are increasingly acting as the first point of contact between consumers and healthcare brands. And the way they decide who shows up, what sounds credible, and which organizations get ignored is based almost entirely on the digital signals you are (or aren’t) putting out into the ecosystem.
The uncomfortable truth? Many health systems are still managing their brands as if consumers are doing deep, long research—when in reality, AI is just doing the research for them.
And that shift changes everything about how trust is built, how visibility is earned, and how patients ultimately choose you.
AI Is Not Disrupting Search, It’s Disrupting Validation
One of the most important insights Carrie shared is that leaders often misunderstand what AI is really changing.
“The biggest misconception is that AI is disrupting search and how people find information about the brand,” she said. “In reality, it’s more of a validation disruption.”
For years, marketing strategy revolved around SEO and driving clicks to a website. Once the consumer landed there, the website told the brand story through photos, rankings, and content.
Today, patients are increasingly asking AI questions like:
Which cardiologist in my area has the lowest complication rates and takes my insurance?
They aren’t clicking through ten links. They’re getting a synthesized answer.
And that answer is a weighted average of every data point AI can crawl, including:
- Google Business profiles
- Yelp listings
- Facebook pages
- Online reviews
- Your website content
- Provider and location data
If those signals conflict, are incomplete, or are outdated, AI doesn’t see your brand clearly. And if AI can’t see you clearly, patients can’t either.
The Patient Journey Is Being Disrupted First
Damian highlighted where this is happening fastest. “The initial stages, such as searching for doctors, care locations, and scheduling appointments, are being disrupted the fastest,” he said.
These are “safe” tasks for AI. And consumers are already comfortable using it for them.
But there’s a problem.
Today’s AI tools are often not highly accurate when sourcing basic healthcare information like locations, hours, and contact details. Damian shared that in testing, ChatGPT is only about 68% accurate when providing basic contact information.
In healthcare, that’s not just inconvenient. It’s dangerous.
As Damian noted, healthcare falls into what Google calls the “your money or your life” category. Inaccurate information here doesn’t just cost you business—it can also impact patient safety.
The Reviews Gap AI Is Trying to Solve
Here’s another tension we discussed. Two-thirds of consumers say online ratings and reviews are critical when choosing a provider. But less than one-third have ever left a review.
That gap is significant, because AI platforms are now doing what Amazon has done for years: summarizing review sentiment in a quick, trusted answer.
And if there aren’t enough recent, well-managed reviews, AI doesn’t have enough signal to represent you accurately.
“These platforms are hungry for data points,” said Carrie. “Reviews are becoming data that AI platforms use to summarize what people feel about your organization.”
This is where patient experience data becomes a strategic asset. Encouraging people to leave reviews, responding to them, and ensuring recency isn’t just reputation management anymore. It’s feeding the AI ecosystem that’s speaking on your behalf.
Multi-Signal Data Is the New SEO
Damian outlined the practical reality that there is no way to claim your listing in ChatGPT. “The only way you can get there is indirectly,” he said, “through strong, consistent signals across Google, Yelp, Facebook, and your website.”
That means the fundamentals matter now more than ever:
- Fully completed and accurate Google Business profiles
- Consistent listings across platforms
- Structured, AI-friendly website content
- Accurate provider and location data
- Active review management
This isn’t a new strategy. But AI has raised the stakes. Now, in addition to being confusing to consumers, inconsistencies are confusing the systems that decide whether you appear at all.
Is It Worse to Be Invisible, or Inaccurate?
During the session, I posed a trick question: Is it worse to be invisible online, or to have bad information online?
The answer is both. Bad information erodes trust instantly; invisibility means patients never even consider you. And AI amplifies both risks.
Who Owns This Inside the Health System?
One of our most important discussions was about governance.
“There shouldn’t be one owner,” Carrie emphasized. “Marketing understands the consumer; IT and data teams understand the systems. This has to be a unified strategy.”
Marketing often doesn’t have access to the data it needs. Data teams aren’t focused on discoverability; IT is focused on security and infrastructure.
But AI doesn’t care about org charts. AI cares about whether the data is clean, accessible, and consistent.
That means health systems must build connective tissue between marketing, IT, data, and patient experience teams to ensure that what’s published externally truly reflects internal reality.
Practical Steps Health Systems Can Take Now
Carrie offered some of the most practical advice of the session: “Use it. Try it. Test it. See how you show up.”
She recommended creating a “tiger team” that:
- Regularly tests how the organization appears in ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews
- Benchmarks performance over time
- Runs real patient-style queries
- Identifies where data is missing or inaccurate
- Repeats this exercise every six months
“Benchmarking over time is critical,” Damian added. “Are the steps you’re taking actually improving how you appear?”
This is about becoming AI-literate as an organization, and proactively managing how your brand is interpreted by machines, before patients ever engage with you.
Why This Is Ultimately About Trust
Nearly half of consumers already have concerns about the accuracy of AI. Which means this represents an opportunity.
If your data is accurate, consistent, and rich, AI becomes a trust amplifier for your brand. If it’s messy, AI becomes a trust eroder.
And as we discussed, we are entering a world of zero-click search and, eventually, agentic AI—where patients may use voice commands and have appointments booked without ever visiting your website.
The question is simple: When AI speaks about your organization, is it telling the right story?
Watch the Full Webcast
This blog only scratches the surface of our discussion. In the webcast, we go much deeper into:
- How AI is reshaping consumer behavior
- The exact signals AI platforms rely on
- How reviews, listings, and content feed AI summaries
- Governance and team structure for AI readiness
- Real, practical ways to test and benchmark your presence
