How to get more patients to your clinic, within the NMC rules

Private doctors and clinics, as India’s national health survey groups them, treat more of the country’s outpatient illness than any other kind of provider. In the survey’s latest round, they treated 43.0% of rural and 43.7% of urban spells of illness treated as outpatients in 2025, against 34.6% and 25.2% for government facilities and 21.8% and 30.5% for private hospitals (the survey’s clinic category also counts informal providers).

The usual answers to “how do I get more patients?”, from offers and before-and-after photos to “best clinic” boards and bought reviews, now mostly break the rules: the National Medical Commission’s guidelines on ethical advertising, in force since 6 October 2026, apply to every registered doctor. Here are the levers that still work, in the order they usually pay off, then what the guidelines allow and forbid, clause by clause. For a hospital, read how to increase OPD footfall.

Which levers work for a clinic?

Start with the patients already calling you

Answer the phone, and call back the ones you miss

A patient who rings your clinic has already chosen you. If nobody answers, the next clinic is one tap away. No one has published how many calls Indian clinics miss, but staffed booking teams miss plenty: NHS Lothian in Scotland saw callers give up on 30.1% of 4,46,012 outpatient booking calls in a year (UK data). People do book by phone: in a US national survey, 56.4% of adults said phone calls were their main way of booking a medical appointment (US data).

An illustration, with assumptions to replace with your own: a clinic that gets 40 calls a day and misses one in four misses 10; if half of those callers book elsewhere, that is 5 patients a day, or about 1,500 visits over 300 working days (our arithmetic). Multiply by your fee.

Measure it this week: every evening, count the missed calls in the clinic phone’s log by hour, and call each back before the next session. An example, written for this guide with a made-up doctor:

For calls that ring while you consult, see what an AI receptionist can do for a small clinic.

Take bookings in the evening and on Sunday

Families decide after work, so a phone nobody answers after the evening session sends tomorrow’s patients elsewhere. The options, cheapest first: a call-back list worked before the next session; a booking page or QR poster for patients who prefer one; an answering service; or an AI receptionist that books into your real free times.

Book the follow-up before the patient leaves

Your own patients are the easiest to see again, and the easiest to lose. Across 105 studies worldwide, about 23% of booked appointments were missed on average (a global figure; we found no Indian one). At an Indian tertiary hospital, patients who missed theirs gave forgetfulness and the lack of a reminder as the leading reasons.

• Turn “come after a week” into a date and a time, on the prescription and in the diary, before the patient leaves.
• Ask whether they’d like a reminder, and send one only to those who say yes. SMS and WhatsApp each have their own rules; our reminder templates cover both.
• Make moving a visit one short call, so a clash becomes a new date rather than a no-show.

In our reading, a reminder about a follow-up the doctor ordered is care, not advertising, which the guidelines define as communication that solicits or promotes a doctor’s services (clause 3.2). Keep it free of offers.

Make your Google Business Profile match reality

Your Google profile is often the first thing a nearby patient sees. Google says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results, and that “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” Its guidelines cover what a clinic needs:

• One doctor, one clinic name: a single profile named “[clinic]: [doctor]”, such as “Asha Child Clinic: Dr Asha Verma” (a made-up example). Titles such as Dr are allowed.
• Two or three doctors: a profile for the clinic, plus one for any doctor who sees patients there during stated hours and wants one. Not one per speciality, and none for support staff.
• Hours: your regular hours, plus special hours for particular days such as festivals and holidays.
• Phone: a number that connects to your clinic and is under your control. List the one your clinic answers.

The NMC’s guidelines count search-engine and platform-based communication as advertising when it is promotional (clause 3.2), so in our reading they cover your profile too. Your clinic’s name, contact details, facilities and fees are factual information you may publish (9.1). “Best”, “No.1”, “most trusted” and “painless” don’t belong there (8.1(iii) and (ix)). Use photos of the clinic, not promotional photos of the doctor (9.2).

Your signboard has rules too. It should be of ordinary size and carry only the doctor’s name, qualifications from a university or statutory body, titles, speciality and registration number with the name of the state medical council, and it must never go up on a chemist’s shop or where the doctor neither lives nor works (clause 7.13). Only recognised qualifications go after your name (1.4.2), only a specialist qualification lets you call yourself a specialist (7.20), and your registration number must be on display in the clinic (1.4.1).

Reviews: earn them, and know who is allowed to ask

Google counts reviews when it judges how well known a business is (local ranking). For doctors, asking is where the rules bite.

Google’s rules. Its content policy prohibits reviews given for any incentive, discouraging negative reviews, asking only happy customers, pressing people to write reviews on the premises, setting staff targets for reviews, and reviews from employees or family. A business may ask for genuine reviews, with nothing in return.

The NMC’s rules. No doctor or medical institution may “solicit, purchase, procure, manipulate or cause to be published” fake, paid or misleading reviews, and “An RMP shall not request or share patient testimonials, recommendations, endorsements or reviews for professional promotion on social media” (Explanation V to clause 3.2). A doctor may not use a patient, an employee or any third party “to do indirectly” what the doctor can’t do directly (8.1(xi)), and isn’t excused because an agency or platform did the publishing (4.4).

What that means for a clinic you run. The guidelines don’t say whether Google reviews count as social media. Our reading is that they probably do, since the guidelines define social media widely (3.6), and that your receptionist asking for a Google review, a QR card on the counter or an agency’s WhatsApp message to your patients can each count as your own request. Until your state medical council or the NMC says otherwise, the safe course for a doctor-run clinic is not to ask at all, nor to repost patients’ praise on Instagram or WhatsApp.

What you can do:

• Give people something worth writing about: a short wait, a clear explanation, a call back when promised.
• Collect feedback privately if it helps you improve, and keep it apart from Google.
• Reply to reviews, good and bad, politely, briefly and promptly, as Google advises, without confirming that the writer was your patient or mentioning any treatment. What patients confide in a doctor is never to be revealed except where the law requires (clause 2.2).

An example reply, written for this guide:

Referrals that don’t break the code of ethics

Family doctors, nearby specialists and nursing homes send patients where they trust the care and hear back about it. That costs time, not money:

• a number a person answers for referring doctors, and a slot for their patient within a day or two;
• a short note back after the visit, with the patient’s agreement;
• case discussions and talks, allowed as academic discussion if they don’t promote your practice or solicit patients (5.1).

What you can’t do is pay or be paid. The code of ethics bars doctors from giving or receiving “any gift, gratuity, commission or bonus” for referring a patient, and from splitting fees (clause 6.4.1). The same goes for sending specimens for tests, so a cut from a lab is out (6.4.2), and doctors may not use touts or agents (7.19). The 2026 guidelines add referral and lead-generation fees (8.1(vii)), and agency or platform deals that pay per patient (8.1(viii)), and tell doctor-listing platforms not to sell paid rankings (9.4).

What the NMC’s October 2026 guidelines allow and forbid

The guidelines apply to every registered doctor (4.1) and to hospitals and medical institutions, a term that includes every clinical establishment under section 2(c)(i) of the Clinical Establishments Act, 2010 (clause 3.4), and that section names the clinic. So a doctor’s clinic answers to both sets of rules, and a doctor who authorises a clinic’s prohibited advertising can be examined personally (11.5).

Three details catch clinics out:

• Fees may be published, as long as they are “factual, transparent and not misleading” (the note after 8.1(x)).
• Every electronic post should say who you are: your name, qualifications, registration status and State or National Medical Register number (Explanation III to 3.2).
• AI content must say so: allowed promotional content made with AI must carry a mark stating its origin (7.2).

Penalties run from a warning and ethics training for a first violation to removal from the register for 1 to 3 years for repeated ones (10.1).

Where DrMate fits

DrMate answers calls and sends only service messages; it doesn’t cold-call patients. It helps with the first three levers. Its AI receptionist answers your clinic’s own number day and night in everyday Hindi and Hinglish, books into your genuinely free times, and puts every caller it can’t help on your call-back list with the reason. DrMate’s front desk sends WhatsApp reminders only to patients who said yes, including one two days before the follow-up date the doctor writes on a DrMate prescription.

You can hear the AI receptionist on our demo line, 080 6553 5931, where it answers as Sunrise Hospital, a sample hospital we made up.