Online Reputation Management For Healthcare

Introduction

An industry like healthcare requires that patients feel a sense of trust in the provider, hospital, or clinic they frequent. The onus lies with the healthcare organization to help ease the patient’s mind and decision-making process by proving that they are trustworthy and reputable. 

The first way to do this is undoubtedly by providing the best services. A good patient experience translates to trust and loyalty. Secondary to this, however important, is building an online reputation. By building a good reputation online, more patients will be able to find your organization and find it trustworthy. 

Importance of Online Reputation Management in Healthcare 

When it comes to Online reputation management in Healthcare, whether it be for a hospital, clinic, pharmacy, rehabilitation center, or hospice there are two areas where you want to establish your online reputation: reputation for your organization and reputation for your doctors. 

Additionally, if you have your departments (department of cardiology, neurology etc)  listed separately on platforms, you should also focus on the online reputation of each of the departments. 

Why is it so important to maintain an online reputation in healthcare? 

Build trust in your doctors and your organization

Whenever a potential patient searches for medical services online they will look up two things. The organization and its doctors. Therefore it is necessary that the patient sees reviews from former patients to form a comprehensive understanding of the organization. A good online reputation will help potential patients trust your organization and your doctors and be persuaded to choose your services over others. 

Improves patient acquisition 

A by-factor of established trust in the organizations and doctors is an increase in the number of appointments. When potential patients see reviews from existing satisfied patients, it gives them the assurance that your practice or organization and doctors  are trustworthy. This results in an increase in appointment bookings. Another factor to consider for increasing appointment bookings is making the booking process easy. Learn more about appointment scheduling and booking. 

It Builds a better relationship with Patients 

Building an online reputation includes actively asking patients for reviews. This process of asking for feedback from patients indicates to the patients that you really care to understand their experience and improve if necessary. 

By asking patients for their review, you are empowering them by giving them a voice. 

Increases patient engagement 

Since you need to actively ask patients for their reviews, you engage in communication with them through various channels. When it is from a channel of their preference, they are more likely to respond to your requests and engage in further conversations. This can effectively help increase patient engagement. 

Builds a better brand image 

Focusing on online reputation management helps you create a better brand image. The process of online reputation management involves not only generating reviews but also responding to reviews whether it be negative or positive. 

How you respond to these reviews sets a precedent for the kind of values your organization espouses. Thus reviews along with your responses can be a great way to curate your brand image. 

The doctors that you employ also add to your brand image and hence it is necessary to focus on their reputation as well. 

How to boost online reputation for healthcare?

Boosting online reputation for healthcare can be achieved through the following steps: 

Ask Patients for Reviews

The most important and perhaps the most obvious way to improve your online reputation is through increasing reviews for your organization. To do this, you must ask your patients to leave reviews.  70% of patients are more likely to leave a review if their healthcare provider actively encourages them to do so. 

A one-star increase in an online review rating can lead to a 5-10% increase in revenue. Higher ratings are associated with better patient acquisition and retention rates.

Manage existing reviews 

Even if you have collected the desired number of reviews for your organization, if you do not respond to the reviews you’re only doing half the job. 

Responding to reviews is an equally important part of online reputation management because it conveys to the patients that you listen and care about their opinions. 

If you receive positive reviews, it is good to show appreciation to the patient for leaving the review by thanking them. 

If you receive a negative review, it is important that you acknowledge it and assure that patient that mistake, if any will be rectified and that you will strive to do better.

One way to make this process much simpler is by using pre-existing templates. An AI-based reputation management software will be able to assess the tone of the review and respond with pre-determined templates for each. 

Automate review requests according to different channels

Healthcare is an industry that has customers across different demographics Old, young, middle-aged, etc. 

To achieve better patient engagement with this varied demographic of patients you need to leverage the communication channels each of this demographic uses. 

For eg, the older demographic of people may prefer phone calls over any other means while a younger demographic may prefer more modern means like email or texting. 

So to get the best results from your review request campaigns, you could segment your patients according to a demographic and automate review requests for that channel. For eg, for middle-aged patients, you could set up email review request automations with the help of a reputation management software and text review requests for a younger demographic. 

The best way to have the older demographic leave reviews could be to simply ask them while they are at your practice. 

Provide patients with an option to leave feedback or review

While it’s good to have a healthy mix of negative and positive reviews, too many negative reviews would bring your ranking down and decrease trust in your organization. 

One way to mitigate an influx of negative reviews is to direct patients to leave feedback instead of a review. This way they can be more detailed with their feedback and you can focus on improving based on the suggestions without having to deal with the negative review online. 

Maintain reviews across different platforms 

Online reputation for healthcare is built across various platforms. One should not just put all their review generation efforts into one basket aka Google. While Google is the largest listing platform that patients would mostly frequent it does not take away from the other important platforms like Healthgrades, WebMD, Yelp, Zocdoc, etc. 

Provider Specific Channels

If you wish to increase your online reputation based on the doctors in your organization, you would like to look into increasing reviews on:

Healthgrades

WebMD

Practice Specific Channels

Reviews on the following channels should be collected and monitored to increase the practice’s reputation:

Yelp

Zocdoc

Automate to receive multiple reviews from one patient 

You can automate your review request process in such a manner that on the first patient visit the review request link takes them to Google (or your platform of preference), on every other consecutive visit, you send them a review request for a different platform. 

1st Visit: Google 

2nd Visit: Healthgrades 

And so on. 

You may also incentivize patients when they complete leaving reviews on all your intended platforms to increase patient engagement with regard to reviews. 

How to respond to reviews for Online Reputation Management for Healthcare? 

An important facet of maintaining an online reputation is how you respond to the reviews you receive and when you respond to them. 

Ideally, you should respond to reviews as soon as you receive them. To inform yourself of a new review, you can set alerts. You can follow these steps to receive email notifications:

1. Sign in to Google My Business
2. .Choose the business location for which you want to get review notifications.
3.  From the menu, click Customers > Reviews.
4.  In the “Get notifications” section, next to “Email,” click the switch to turn it on.

Negative Reviews

Next, you need to know how to respond to reviews, you may keep these points in mind when responding to negative reviews:

Acknowledge the review

Take a second and step into your patient’s shoes. Anything could have triggered a bad experience for them. Maybe they already had a bad day and an inconvenience with your organization made it worse. Maybe it was genuinely a mistake from your end. Always take an empathetic approach when it comes to negative patient reviews.

The way you deal with these reviews will lay the foundation for establishing the kind of values your organization follows. Assure the reviewer that you understand their grievances and that you will go all out to help them have a better experience.

Apologize

Always remember to add these two things in your reply: Thank you and Sorry.

Thank them for taking out time and leaving your organization a review. Do not get defensive. It might be your first reaction but you need to realize that doing so would put you in a bad position among your patients. Be sure to add a sincere apology for the inconvenience cost. Reiterate how sorry you are about the error from your end and give an assurance that you will try and make things right.

Offer to connect offline

Do not just view a negative review as a threat or a black mark on your reputation. If dealt with properly and understood thoroughly it is a major learning opportunity. Keeping this in mind offer the reviewer a chance to talk on a different platform or connect offline.

You can assign a dedicated agent to understand the reviewer’s trouble or you can provide the reviewer a dedicated contact number on which they can reach out and explain the trouble in detail.

Not only do you get to learn and improve but it also shows the reviewer and the other patients who read the review that you are willing to go the extra mile to provide your patients the best possible service. 

Provide an explanation

Patients deserve to know why service was inadequate from your end, it is one of the reasons why they left a strongly worded review. They want to be heard and given a reasonable explanation about the same.

If it was a genuine mistake tell them so, if it is something you are currently working on improving let them know as well! It’s good to be as transparent as possible. Let the reviewer know that they are not just dealing with the business front but with real actual people behind who are ready to listen and resolve.

Always maintain HIPAA Compliance 

Remember to always maintain HIPAA compliance when responding to a patient review. Replying with the name of the doctor or the date of appointment can be a HIPAA violation, so refrain from adding any information that can be used as a patient identifier. 

Positive Reviews

Acknowledge and Thank

Appreciate the patient for taking the time out to leave a review and thank them for the positive review

Respond Timely

Make sure to respond to the review as quickly as possible.

How Online reputation management for healthcare can be boosted through a reputation software?

Saves time by automating the process

Reputation management software have automation options that help organizations to integrate with their EHR and send review requests automatically. All you need to do is turn on the review request automation and edit the campaign if needed. This will save you tons of time and free up your staff to focus their energies on other important tasks such as on-the-floor patient handling. 

Allows better management of reviews 

An online reputation management software allows you to manage reviews received across multiple platforms under one dashboard. You can access the list of reviews by simply changing platform listing (such as   Google, Facebook, Yelp, Healthgrades, WebMD) tabs under the software dashboard. You can also respond to reviews through the software. You will be able to save time that you would have otherwise spent switching between platforms and keeping track of all the reviews. 

Helps collect reviews across multiple platforms

Reputation management softwares can automate the process of sending review requests for multiple platforms. It can smartly use AI to detect if a patient has already left a review on a particular platform like Google. On the patient’s subsequent visit to the organization, it will now send a review request for a different platform like maybe  WebMD. This will ensure that reviews are collected from the same patient for different platforms. 

Provides review request templates 

Reputation management softwares come with templates that you can use for responding to patient reviews and also for sending review requests. You can also customize templates based on your organization’s needs. You will save time that you would otherwise spend crafting replies or messages. You can also use AI technology to respond to reviews based on whether they are positive or negative through existing templates. 

Achieve online reputation management for healthcare using Emitrr 

Emitrr can help you achieve reputation management for your healthcare organization by helping you generate more reviews, respond to reviews, and monitor reviews across different platforms. Let’s see how: 

How to generate more reviews through Emitrr? 

Manually 

To create and send a review request campaign manually you can follow these steps: 

1. Go to “Send” on the top right corner and select “Review Request” from the menu
   
   
2. Upon selecting, the text editor will automatically fill in with a template. You can add personalization tokens to it if required.(refer to  (1) and (2) )
3. You can send the intended contacts from the recipient search bar by either typing their number or name. 
4. If you add more than one contact you will receive a prompt asking you to “Start a group chat” or “ message recipients individually”. Select the latter. (refer to (3))
5. Once done you can either send the message immediately or schedule for later. (refer to (4))
   
   

Automatically 

To send automated reminder texts, you can simply go to “Campaigns” on the left navigation panel and select “Automations.” From there select CRM automations and you will be able to access a list of automations. 

Turn on the one labeled “Reviews”. That’s it, your campaign would be up and running!

How to respond to reviews through Emitrr?

You can respond to reviews through the Emitrr dashboard by navigating to “Reputation>Reviews” on the left navigation panel. You will be able to see a list fo all the replies you have received so far. You can choose the required reviews and respond to it by adding your message and hitting “reply”. You can also edit a previous response and hit “ Edit reply”.

Hot to monitor reviews using Emitrr? 

You can navigate to settings and under notifications you can turn on the toggle for receiving notification for every review. This way you will be able to monitor reviews you receive across all platforms via Emitrr. 

Why Emitrr is the best software for improving online reputation

Over 1000+ Healthcare Integrations

Emitrr integrates with over 1000+ PMS/EHRs. This helps organizations automate review requests as soon as patients check out. These integrations help keep patient data up to date and send timely messages to patients. 

Increases patient engagement via SMS

Through Emitrr you can send Automated review requests via SMS. Since SMS has an open rate of 98%, you can be assured that the patient opens and reads your message. 

Get reviews from across all channels under one dashboard 

Reviews generated across all relevant channels such as Google, Facebook, BBB, WebMD, Zocdoc, etc can be viewed and responded to from the Emitrr dashboard. 

Set up an automated review response system 

Through Emitrr, you can set up automated review responses. You can set up responses based on whether they are negative or positive. Every time you receive a response which is positive, the positive response set up by you will be automatically added, and similarly for a negative review. 

Generate reviews across multiple platforms

Through Emitrr you can Identify patients who have already left a review on a particular site, and direct them to submit another review on another site when they visit the organization the next time. 

Access Review Request Templates

Use available review SMS templates to send requests instantly. Emitrr has a repository of review requests that you can use in your campaigns. You also have access to review response templates (positive and negative) that you can use while manually responding to reviews. 

Monitor reviews and filter them 

You can monitor all the reviews you have received under the Emitrr dashboard and filter them on the basis of location, review source, and rating. 

Online reputation management for healthcare Case Study 

Healthcare organization Pinnacle Medical Group saw 3x growth in their reviews and online reputation by using Emitrr’s reputation features. 

Pinnacle Medical Group found that Emitrr provided an easy and effective way to collect reviews. Patients received an automated text message asking them to leave a review, and as a result, Pinnacle Medical Group saw a significant increase in the number of reviews they received. Within just three days of using Emitrr, they had over 90 reviews, and all four of their offices had improved ratings on Google and Facebook 

Online Reputation Management for Healthcare FAQs