How Community Health Centers of the Central Coast nearly doubled Google Business Profile views by growing their online reviews 40x
19,652
reviews built in first year
91.7%
Increase in Google Business Profile Views
Since 1978, Community Health Centers of the Central Coast (CHCCC) has been dedicated to offering high-quality, low-cost primary health care at their state-of-the-art clinics in San Luis Obispo and Northern Santa Barbara counties.
Today, more than 130 providers deliver care across its growing network of clinics, making CHCCC one of the region’s most established healthcare systems.
The Problem
For more than a decade, Victoria Wood has served as the Chief Experience Officer at CHCCC, where she is responsible for four interconnected areas: patient experience, employee experience, contact center operations, and marketing. She is responsible not only for what happens inside the walls of CHCCC’s clinics, but also how the organization is perceived outside of them.
Despite delivering excellent care, CHCCC’s online reputation told a different story. With an average star rating of just 3.0 across all locations and providers, their online reputation was creating the wrong first impression for prospective patients, community members, and job candidates.
With 84% of patients checking online reviews before choosing a provider, CHCCC had to confront today’s reality: losing new and existing patients to competitors with stronger online reputations. Nearby hospitals started acquiring local primary care practices, creating competition that a rural federally qualified health center (FQHC) like CHCCC rarely faces.
Physician recruitment also remained highly competitive. As Wood explained, “For every general practitioner, they have 100 offers from other provider organizations. It’s really important that we not only recruit them with our mission, but that we also create a mechanism via patient feedback that really allows them to see what kind of organization we are.”
Meanwhile, CHCCC’s marketing team needed to manage over 30 Google Business Profiles (GBPs) and dozens of provider listings manually. With no centralized system or scalable process, Wood shared, “We were doing our best, but we were failing miserably at that.”
The Solution
As Wood describes it, the traditional mindset in FQHCs has been that “the patients are assigned to us, ” but in 2022, she set out to challenge that assumption by treating patients as consumers who have a choice and deserve to see their quality of care reflected online.
After evaluating several reputation management vendors, CHCCC selected the rater8 Visibility Engine (raVE), where the decision came down to ease of use and seamless integration. “It was pretty much a set it and forget it type of thing,” Wood said. “We turned it on and it went right to work.”
Overall, raVE addressed CHCCC’s challenges on multiple fronts: namely, having the ability to view and respond to feedback in a single dashboard, eliminating the burden of monitoring over 30 Google Business Profiles manually. The turnkey integration with their athenahealth EHR enabled seamless, automated review requests. This streamlined verified patient feedback to sites that needed reviews the most, like Google, Vitals, and other platforms, without adding work for their staff.
The patient feedback summaries, built for each individual provider, became pivotal for engagement. By combining quantitative metrics with qualitative patient comments, the scorecards gave providers feedback they could understand and act on.
“Our providers are more engaged with the patient feedback summaries than any other measurement tool in our organization,” Wood said. “It’s easy to understand, it has qualitative and quantitative data, and it’s very consistent and engaging.”
The Results
CHCCC’s implementation of raVE created a feedback loop that turned patient sentiment into measurable growth. By treating reputation management as a continuous process rather than a one-time fix, Wood built momentum that compounded over time.
Improved Online Reputation
In the year before raVE, CHCCC accumulated 481 new online reviews across all major healthcare review platforms. Within their first year with raVE, that number jumped to 19,652 reviews, a 3,985% increase.
Notably, CHCCC saw an increase not only in total reviews, but in the quality of those reviews as well. One- and two-star reviews, which previously made up 15% of all feedback, dropped to just 2% of total volume. The vast majority of new patient reviews reflected the quality of care CHCCC had been providing for decades.
With the influx of verified patient feedback, CHCCC also dramatically improved their online ratings for every clinic, provider, and facility. Their overall star rating went from a 3.0 to a stellar 4.81, and today, not a single location or provider sits below 4.0 stars.
The impact of raVE also showed up in GBP engagement. From December 2023 to April 2025, GBP views increased 91.7%, meaning significantly more prospective patients were discovering CHCCC via Google search results. Calls increased 55.2%, turning more of those searches into appointment inquiries, and direction requests increased 24%. For current patients, that means finding the right clinic address is now as simple as a quick Google search rather than navigating to the website. For prospective patients, it means they can easily gauge distance and convenience before deciding to book, lowering one more barrier between searching and choosing CHCCC.
Better Patient Care and Engagement
The data from raVE also enabled CHCCC to identify and fix specific operational issues. At their high-traffic Del Valle Clinic, an immediate care facility in Santa Maria, patients sometimes waited two hours to be seen. Feedback collected via raVE pinpointed these friction points, specifically around wait times and whether patients felt their questions and concerns were being addressed. Changes to the phone system produced what Wood described as a “tremendous improvement,” and the clinic’s overall satisfaction score around wait times has been improving steadily since.
Meanwhile, at Arbor Women’s Health, OBGYNs being called to the hospital regularly disrupted scheduled appointments, leading net promoter scores (NPS) to drop into the 30s. Using data from patient satisfaction surveys, CHCCC’s leadership team partnered with Cal Poly’s industrial engineering program to redesign the back-office workflow, creating a system that referred patients to other mid-level providers so they could still be seen in the office when disruptions occurred. Those satisfaction scores are now trending upward, reaching an NPS of 87+.
Increased Employee Pride and Retention
CHCCC’s improved online reputation also had an unexpected benefit: employee pride.
The World Health Organization projected a global shortage of 18 million healthcare workers by 2030, and for an FQHC like CHCCC, every departure costs money, continuity, and community trust.
“We have seen a significant improvement in our turnover,” Wood said.
In the organization’s internal employee satisfaction surveys, two questions stood out. Staff were asked whether they were proud to work for CHCCC and how they felt about the organization’s reputation in the community. Since partnering with rater8, both sentiments have improved significantly.
“There is a connection there,” Wood said, pointing to a pattern she’s seen especially among millennial and Gen Z employees. “It’s very purpose-driven. And so there is a connection with the mission of the work that they’re doing, but how that is perceived in the community.”
Beyond internal pride, the praise has extended to social media, where employees have become more engaged by sharing content, following CHCCC’s channels, and taking visible ownership of CHCCC’s public image.
That kind of positive engagement translates to lower recruiting and training costs, better continuity of care, and the ability to attract stronger candidates who want to work at a respected organization.
For Wood, the value of raVE goes beyond the numbers. It’s about having the data to have real conversations with providers and staff, and the time to act on what patients are telling them.
“You can really do more meaningful work because you can have the conversations,” she said. “You can take the time. You can build a relationship with your staff and build a relationship with your patients.”
CHCCC’s story shows that patient feedback, when captured and connected across an organization, does more than improve online visibility. It sharpens operations, strengthens staff retention, gives leadership real data to act on, and builds a practice that grows from the inside out.
“The beautiful thing about raVE is that it’s a solution that manages itself and allows you to make decisions that are informed,” said Wood. “I’m extremely thankful for raVE and what it’s been able to do for our care teams and our patients.”
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