Online Reputation Management for Physicians

Before potential patients call your office to book an appointment, they often go online to gather all the information they can about your practice. According to a study from Digital Assent, 85 percent of patients are not comfortable choosing a healthcare provider with a one-star rating for more than 10 percent of the reviews.
Patients now are conscious, make informed decisions and have more choices now than ever. It is essential, therefore, that practices act in a way that gives them the best possible online reputation.

Managing your practice’s online reputation is an ongoing process. In order to establish and protect your reputation, there are a few rules you should follow to ensure you are not sabotaging your brand image or letting a tainted reputation go unchecked.

To understand the importance of creating a reputation management strategy for your medical practice it is important to first understand how healthcare reviews and patient satisfaction scores work. There are several online review sites where patients can weigh-in about your practice and their patient experience. Websites such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook allow visitors to leave a 1-5-star review about the quality of a company’s products and services and write a description that explains the reason for this rating.

The potential hazard of patient review sites comes when patients go to these sites, unprompted, to offer their feedback. This becomes a gamble for healthcare providers because patients are leaving a review for one of two reasons; they either had a good experience or they had a bad experience. More often than not the unprompted reviews are negative. While you may have the utmost confidence in the care you provided your patient, there are many other reasons they may report a negative experience.

From the first phone call or online interaction with your office to the final departure from your building, the patient experience covers that and everything in between. When a patient leaves you a review, the overall impression of your practice can really have nothing to do with the quality of care you provided.

Parts of the patient experience that may influence how a patient feels about your practice are:

The validity of your practice information online.
The ease of making an appointment.
The friendliness of your staff on the first phone call or correspondence.
Parking availability or lack thereof.
The environment within your practice and how it made the patient feel.
The cleanliness of your office (you don’t want patients taking pictures of overflowing trash cans).
The helpfulness of your staff (are they trained?).
Wait times.
Privacy practices.
The ease of dealing with the billing department and handling insurance issues.

A patient review might have nothing to do with you personally as a healthcare provider and everything to do with how your front desk receptionist made them feel. To further complicate this, your overall online rating is determined by an average of the reported reviews. So, if you are not proactively managing new five star reviews and one patient goes online and leaves a negative review, your practice rating will go down.

Although there’s very little cost involved, the Internet has many facets and reputation management requires a systematic commitment of time and effort. (You may want some professional help, particularly to get things going at the outset.)

Here are some of the essential concepts for effectively managing your online status:

Your reputation lives in two places: online and in-person. Pay attention to both daily. Few things have a higher priority for doctors…concern for their professional reputation is hard earned and constantly protected in their daily work. Physicians need no reminder of the “in-person” part. But the “online” part—which is often out-of-sight-out-of-mind—deserves equal concern and attention.

What’s online can hurt you and it can help you. The Internet is the home of “digital word-of-mouth.” Comments—either good or bad—tend to be seen as a form of endorsement, crowd sourcing, or social proof. Patient recommendations and testimonials can, and often do, significantly influence the decision process and provider selection of other patients.

The Internet never forgets. Never. It’s frustrating to think that user-generated comments often remain online (and available) even when they are incorrect, inaccurate, and often undated. Because things are “continuously available” online is further reason to keep your figurative stethoscope on this vital sign.