Reviews and Reputation Management for Orthopedic Clinics

Introduction to Orthopedic Reputation and Review Management

Reputation and review management for orthopedic clinics is no longer optional; it is critical for growth, trust, and revenue. Over 68% of orthopedic patients consult online Google reviews before selecting an orthopedic specialist. Orthopedic clinics are not simply viewing reviews.  Just like every other industry, orthopedic clinics will use any and all available tools to manage reviews. Orthopedic clinics have their patients complete automated texting after surgery, requesting a review of their orthopedic appointment and experience, while the experience is still fresh in the minds of the patients.

What makes orthopedic reputation management different? Unlike other specialists, orthopedic patients will be treated over months of time and are usually a component of long-term care and rehabilitation. So, while a patient may have a single point of contact with other specialists, patient satisfaction is based on weeks or months of treatment with an orthopedic team of experts.

Clinics with an average star rating of 4.8+ will receive 25-30% more bookings than those clinics rated less than 4.5. That minute gap could make the difference between being completely booked for an orthopedic appointment or not throughout the calendar year.

The Importance of Reputation and Review Management for Orthopedic Clinics

A clinic’s reputation is its most important asset in a highly competitive environment of healthcare. The patient journey has changed, and this is why reviews matter and reputation management for orthopedic clinics is critical.

• Patient Decision-Making: Reputation now trumps location when selecting an orthopedic provider. Proximity was previously a major issue, but with access to online reviews, patients are willing to travel farther for an orthopedic surgeon or clinic with a solid reputation. They look for good surgical management reviews and good overall vibes before they will even consider the drive.
• Referrals and Online Validation: Patients coming in to the office on referral will likely call that office to schedule an orthopedic appointment, but they’ll visit online reviews beforehand. A personal recommendation still carries weight, but it’s frequently verified online. Should a referred orthopedic surgeon have bad or few online reviews, this may cause doubt and force potential patients to seek out another option. A critically important part of the patient journey reinforces the importance of strong orthopedic review strategies.
• The Must-Know Takeaway: Good feedback means building trust sooner. When potential patients read a steady flow of positive comments about an orthopedic clinic, they develop trust in the clinic, thus reducing the patient onboarding cycle. This means less spend to convert inquiries to orthopedic appointments booked, providing your orthopedic business with a competitive advantage.
• Revenue Correlation: The correlation between a strong online reputation and revenues is evident. The higher the star-rating and the more and more recent, “real” patient reviews for an orthopedic doctor, the more those factors dictate both surgery volume and walk-in physical therapy patients. Patients will find the orthopedic surgeon to be one they can trust, which will result in more orthopedic procedures and a greater volume of patients for overall clinical orthopedic rehabilitation. This is where online reputation management for orthopedics becomes essential for the financial health of the business.

Learn more about the importance of reviews and reputation management here:

Important Elements of Reputation and Review Management for Orthopedic Clinics

Ramping up reviews and reputation management for orthopedic clinics requires a combination of proactive processes, ongoing monitoring, and competent responses.

Claim and Optimize Profile Listings

• To start, Google My Business (GMB) is the listing that the public sees the most. Verify your account has current information, the correct categories (i.e. “Orthopedic Surgeon”), and images of your practice. It is critical to keep your information as consistent as you can across all sites and applications.
• Healthcare accreditation websites such as Healthgrades, Vitals, WebMD, Zocdoc, as well as local hospitals, should be listed appropriately (and often they allow reviews too!). Information about alternative insurances and what specialties you practice should be complete too.
• Social media such as Facebook or Instagram can also help build communities around your practice and might be where most of your followers are from, sharing patient success stories after clinical orthopedic rehabilitation practices.

Review Generation

• Don’t wait to receive feedback, ask for it. The best time to do this is following an appointment or after the patient has been discharged from therapy. Use SMS or email as tools to send review requests, or even post a QR code in your clinic for direct access.

Review Monitoring

• Capture all reviews in real time and automatically with a centralized model. Use sentiment analysis to find valuable trends and develop your orthopedic business from the patient perspective.

Responding to Reviews

• Respond to all reviews promptly and professionally. For negative reviews, show your empathy and offer to connect with them offline. Always comply with HIPAA, don’t include patient names, details, or treatments you provided in any response.

Internal Feedback

• Leverage patient surveys (such as NPS) to spot early signs of problems. Just as the company teaches a Vibe squad to make customer experience a priority, train your staff to make patient experience a priority; the smallest improvements can have an impact on the orthopedics review and your overall satisfaction.

Challenges in Managing Orthopedic Reputation and Review

Even though managing the online reputation of doctors has many benefits, orthopedic clinics are uniquely challenged by their reputation and how to manage it appropriately.

• HIPAA Compliance: Clinics must acknowledge feedback without revealing a patient’s identity or Protected Health Information (PHI) because there are so many variables that could be accommodated under HIPAA. Even a small detail could violate HIPAA; therefore, ensuring templates are pre-approved and your staff is adequately trained is vital.
• High Expectations & Complex Cases: Recovery from orthopedic care is long and hard. Even if the clinical outcome is good, negative reviews can be received if the patient’s expectations are not met. One way is to set realistic recovery timelines from the beginning.
• Review Gating Risks: It is low integrity to filter reviews by only asking happy patients to leave you reviews, engaging in this tactic would be in violation of Google and Yelp policies, as well as posing a destination for compounded risk. In short, authenticity and transparency encourage trust long-term.
• Multiple Platforms: Managing all the reviews on Google, Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Facebook, etc., takes time. If an orthopedic clinic has conflicting information in a patient review and the location from which they seek care from, this will impact many areas of responsibility, including SEO for your practice. Using centralized treatment catalogs or patient engagement tools can help to avoid these challenges.
• Organizational Buy-In and Staff Training:  Your entire staff may not have the same perspective and may push back to engage in a new process. By training all roles and stopping along the journey to check in with all staff. (Front Desk, M.A., Surgeon, etc.) and think about expectations to best support your team, encourage clinic buy-in, and improve the patient experience.
• Unfair Reviews: Professionalism and understanding are also key when dealing with over-the-top or emotional reviews. Most platforms will not take down negative feedback, but clinics may learn how to flag content that violates policies.

Best Practices for Orthopedic Reputation and Review Management

When it comes to managing online reputation for your orthopedic clinics, it takes time, strategy, and a patient-focused service to make people happy. Below, please find some of the top best practices:

Generate Reviews Proactively

Take the attention and your time. Don’t wait. In all the best practices related to reputation management and review generation, you should be asking for reviews, often. Help patients and your practice with your review request immediately following a post-op travel visit or PT session.

• Consider timing: The nearer the happy moment after the surgery, the more accurate the review will be.
• Use multiple platforms: make it easy for patients to leave a review by providing options such as at the office via QR code, SMS, email, and/or reviews upon checkout.
• Educate your patients: people find quality orthopaedic care, and their feedback/ reviews will help the practice to continue to improve and enhance orthopaedic care.

Review Monitoring, Processing, Ecosystem

Check reviews on the platforms daily, have someone ensure all reviews are monitored, or have a reputation management tool like Emitrr to monitor for you.

• Respond to all reviews: Positive or negative, show that you are responsive, listening, and care.
• Have a workflow: Decide who is replying and how to escalate problems internally.

How to Respond Appropriately (legally and HIPAA compliant)

• Be empathetic and generic: Thank the patient in general terms without providing any PHI to the public.
• Avoid PHI: Never disclose the patient’s name, condition, or treatment type.
• Take it offline: When responding to a negative review, reach out to the patient to talk via phone, email or to get the patient to return to the office for appropriate resolution of the concern.
• Templates: It should be used for quick reference as to how to reply to a review that is pre-approved (HIPAA compliant or guided by legal) and this will save time and allow some type of consistency across the practice.

Leverage Positive Reviews

• Showcase online: Get written or video testimonials – share the love on your website, and social platforms (if you have the customers permission to do so).
• Spread cheer inside: Use great feedback to uplift trust and morale among your own team 24.

Learn from Negative Reviews

• Spot patterns: Use a series of complaints to address systemic problems (say, long waits or billing confusion).
• Follow-up: If something does change, kindly ask the patient to update the review (never ask for removal).

Encourage Staff Buy-In

• Train regularly: Educate your staff about the connection between patient experience, reviews, and clinic growth.
• Recognize employee efforts: Incorporate staff commended for his or her performance in reviews and reward or acknowledge them (no money rewards).

How to Respond to Online Reviews

Replying to online reviews in HIPAA-compliant and effective ways is crucial if your orthopedic clinic is working on a plan for managing the online reputation of your doctors.

• Always acknowledge the feedback: Thank the reviewer, even when the review is negative. Use respectful and appreciative language, such as “Thank you for your kind words” or “We appreciate your feedback.”
• Avoid exposure of PHI: You should never identify a name, treatment, or specific health matter. Keep your response general and compliant with privacy. For example, you might say, “We are dedicated to providing quality surgical care,” rather than commenting about a specific situation.
• Empathize and redirect: Negatively rated reviews require you to show empathy, but not to confirm their review specifically to avoid PHI. Express that you would be happy to discuss more in various responses, whether by phone, or secure email, even.
• Pre-approved response format: It is always best to have HIPAA-compliant response formats for every form of review (positive, neutral, and negative). You can automatically reply with HIPAA-compliant language and protect the reviewer’s privacy using replies you have already agreed upon.
• Reply to all reviews, not just the negative reviews: Good reviews encourage loyalty, encourage additional reviews, and keep people connected to your orthopedic clinic, while demonstrating that you value every patient experience.

How Emitrr Can Help Orthopedic Clinics in Enhancing Online Reputation

Emitrr is the all-in-one platform for orthopedic clinics to streamline reviews and reputation management by generating, monitoring, responding to, and syndicating reviews.

A. Send Review Requests through Emitrr

• Send as SMS/Email: Leveraging Emitrr’s dashboard, send a group or individual invite through high-response channels like SMS and email.
• Smart Templates: Generate smart embedded links to places like Google or Healthgrades for seamless one-click reviews.
• Automate Timing: Schedule requests past the appointment or operation when the patient is happiest.

B. Managing Reviews with Emitrr

• Real-time Alerts: Receive an e-mail when a new orthopedics article is posted.
• Cross-platform Tracking: Track the reviews from Google, Facebook, Healthgrades, etc., all in one place – saving time and effort.

C. Responding to Reviews

• Complete Dashboard: View and respond to feedback from multiple sources.
• Respond Directly: Use click-to-reply to respond easily from one platform.
• Pre-Authorized Integrations with SMS Templates: Leverage templates that are HIPAA-compliant for professional, safe communication.

D. Sharing Reviews

• Share directly on Social Media: Share positive reviews on Facebook or any other social media channel and begin to create social proof.
• Develop a Wall Full of Testimonials: Encourage trust by adding a live activity feed of reviews to your website, urging new patients to schedule an orthopedic appointment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

In conclusion, you will need to efficiently manage your orthopedic clinic’s online presence. Patients will first decide to request an orthopedic appointment based on the review’s demonstrated trust by existing or past patients.

Emitrr is committed to supporting your orthopedic business by providing technology to facilitate the collection of reviews, HIPAA-compliant replies, and tracking your reviews in real time, all on a single platform. With Emitrr, online reputation management for orthopedics can be simple, efficient, and secure.

Final Tip: “Your next 5-star review is only a message away.”