Practo Feedback Guidelines for Patients

Practo Feedback Guidelines for Practo Users

Practo collects feedback from patients on their conditions, symptoms and how the doctor helped them get better in order to help other patients choose a doctor that is best suited to solve their health issues. Here are some guidelines to help patients write useful feedback:

  • Keep it Real & Original: Please share only your first-hand experiences. Avoid copying or quoting material from other sources such as other feedback responses, getting paid to write feedback or posting feedback from multiple accounts. We will pull down feedback written for healthcare professionals without a prior appointment with them. Practo works on trust.
  • Refrain from using inappropriate language: Please refrain from using profanity, threats, prejudiced comments, hate speech, sexually explicit language, or other inappropriate content. We encourage constructive feedback, but personal attacks, value judgements, or  generalisations about an individual’s intent directed at disparaging the individual is not allowed.
  • Conflict of interest and professional ethics: Patient feedback is most valuable when it is genuine and unbiased. If you own or work at a medical establishment, please don’t give feedback about your own medical establishment or employer. Don’t accept money, products, or services to write feedback for a healthcare professional or to write negative feedback about another healthcare professional. If you’re a business owner, don’t set up feedback stations or kiosks at your workplace asking for feedback to be published on Practo. This includes doctor to doctor feedback (including that submitted by medical establishment staff & representatives). This also includes references about other healthcare professionals or their comments on medical judgements by another healthcare professional.
  • Patients aren’t the best to assess a healthcare professional’s medical abilities: We do not encourage any comments on the accuracy of the diagnosis or treatment as that would be a matter, which requires an expert opinion. This is why we blur out the portion of feedback that talk about medical abilities/procedures. However, the concerned healthcare professional can view the entire feedback privately.
  • Posting Promotional Material is a BIG No-No: This includes self-promotional URLs, email addresses, or phone numbers in the feedback section.
  • Be Descriptive: To ensure that users read quality feedback, we have set the minimum word count to 100. Do remember that your feedback can help millions of patients make a well informed decision. For their benefit, please be as factual & descriptive as possible. Currently, we only accept feedback written in English.
  • Share Your Valid Contact Info: We may need to get in touch with you regarding your feedback. Please provide your legitimate contact information. We do not share your details with anyone. 
  • Turning 13 Next Month?: Sorry! You have to be at least 13 years old to write feedback on Practo. But, your family member can write a feedback for you, not a friend. Impersonation or misrepresentation of your identity is not acceptable.
  • Avoid Comparison: Patients can mention cost-related details for treatments with Practo, but they cannot share the same details about other doctors or centres for comparison.
  • Play by the rules: In case a patient tries to take undue advantage of the Feedback system such as using negative feedback to tarnish a doctor’s image, Practo reserves the right to not publish her/his feedback.
  • Be quick: The date of sharing feedback should not be older than a year from the date of appointment.

Additionally, For The Patient:

  1. Practo reserves the right to not publish feedback pertaining to any medico-legal issues and that are sub judice under the relevant authorities.
  2. Do not change the reply post submission of a response by the doctor to the feedback. Practo reserves the right to pull down any feedback updated after a response has been added to it.
  3. This platform accepts only appointment experience with doctors and establishments. Feedback about Practo will not be published here. You can share your Practo experience on Play Store or through the official website (Practo.com).
  4. Please share the correct information about your consultation details. This may include the doctor you consulted with, the establishment you had consulted with them at, the health concern you had visited for, or the facts mentioned by you in the feedback. In case of any reported inaccuracy in the information provided, Practo reserves the right to not publish such feedback.
  5. We publish feedback for both in-clinic experiences as well as online consultation experiences. The online consultation feedback will undergo the same rules of moderation as the in-clinic feedback. Every online consultation feedback will have to be backed by an appointment proof or prescription to validate the experience. In addition, feedback can be shared for a maximum of 3 months from the time of appointment for online consultations. Additionally, the user needs to clearly mention that the feedback is being submitted for consultation done online, else the publishing team may reach out to the user to update the feedback with this information to be added. This will help the other users on the platform reading the feedback to get context of how the consultation was undertaken, and also for the healthcare provider for whom it is being written.

Feedback Moderation Mechanism

Our moderators make sure that only transparent, legitimate and helpful feedback responses reach you. Moreover, irrespective of the feedback responses being positive or negative, the moderators do not influence or change the content. Our highly-efficient automated tools used to flag questionable content help detect non-compliant with ease.

Moderators may get in touch with you to verify details of your feedback.

Open Feedback

You can write feedback for healthcare service providers you visited in the past even if you didn’t book an appointment with them using Practo. Simply search for them on Practo and type up how your visit went.

Practo reserves the right to remove feedback at any time, for any reason. The feedback posted on Practo contains individual and highly subjective opinions. The opinions expressed are those of Practo users and not of Practo Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (or its subsidiaries or parent companies). Practo does not endorse any opinions expressed by users and is not affiliated with any provider or establishment listed on this web site.

Practo Feedback FAQs

1. What information do you collect via feedback?

Practo Feedback asks users about their appointment experience. The information that we collect can be categorized as:

  1. Recommendation – whether the user would recommend the doctor to his/her friends & family
  2. Wait-Time – how long the user had to wait for his/her appointment
  3. Feedback about Healthcare Service Provider – User’s testimonial about the experience with a doctor in terms of behaviour, appointment experience, hygiene, etc.
  4. Health Issue – Reason to visit the doctor

2. Where is this feedback showcased?

Feedback and recommendations collected via Practo Feedback are updated on Practo.com and on Practo’s smartphone apps. Recommendation score is visible when the doctor receives 10 or more recommendations. In case there are less than 10 recommendations, we don’t display anything at all. For appointment experience score, it is displayed when we receive 5 or more patient feedback on the clinic.

3. How does Practo define non-compliant feedback?

The following leads to Practo categorising feedback as non-compliant:

  1. A healthcare service provider or healthcare establishment attempting to boost his/her/its own property’s reputation by:
  • Writing feedback for own practice
  • Asking friends or relatives to write feedback
  • Submitting feedback on behalf of a user
  • Copying comment cards and submitting them as feedback
  • Pressurizing Practo or a user to remove feedback
  • Offering incentives such as discounts, upgrades or any special treatment in exchange for feedback
  • Hiring an optimization company, a third party marketing organization, or anyone to submit false feedback
  1. A healthcare service provider attempting to promote/ malign his/her competitors by submitting feedback

4. How much does Practo Feedback cost?

Feedback collected from users who book appointment via Practo is a completely free service. The service for collecting feedback from users who visit Practo Ray-enabled healthcare establishment is free for a limited time.

5. Why are you providing Practo Feedback for free?

A user’s decision to choose a doctor might be largely governed by feedback given by previous patients. We want doctors to experience the benefits of Practo Feedback so that they can get to know your patients/customers better. This can help you understand and meet their expectations with ease.

6. How fair is Practo’s feedback system?

Practo Feedback limits the number of SMS and emails sent to a particular user to one-per-month, even if he/she books more than one appointments during this period. This ensures sufficient cool-off period between subsequent feedback responses from the same user and a robust and fair feedback model.

7. What should I do if I am not satisfied with the response from the doctor/establishment?

We make sure that the response is directly from the doctor or the authorised owner/administrator of the establishment. However, Practo does not investigate the veracity of the response. All responses are published on Practo.com as long as they are in line with our publishing guidelines. In case you have concerns about the response, we request you to connect with the doctor for clarification.

8. I have more questions. Who do I talk to?

You can always reach out to Practo Support (support@practo.com) and we will try our best to resolve your queries as soon as possible.