Introduction
Online reputation management for hospitals is a key metric for overall success for any healthcare practice. When you are not feeling well, and decide to visit a doctor, how do you pick which doctor to see? You might ask around or go online to check the reviews about the doctor or healthcare organization. Patients always want to be treated by the most trusted and skilled healthcare practitioner in their vicinity. But figuring this out can be difficult.
Here, online reputation comes into play. The online reputation of a healthcare provider or a larger healthcare practice is a key deciding factor for a patient. Most patients head onto to the internet to check reviews of different hospitals before selecting where to go. 84% of patients first check online reviews about any healthcare provider. How do you bring a surge in online reputation management for hospitals?
Well, Online Reputation Management is a crucial process of monitoring, influencing, and maintaining the perceptions and opinions about a healthcare provider or organization within its target prospects. Online reputation management for hospitals ensures that new prospects are well-informed about the healthcare organization’s capabilities while maintaining the trust of regular patients. Hospital reputation management helps bring different healthcare providers into the limelight and more business growth for the healthcare practice.
Importance Of Online Reputation Management For Hospitals
Build trust
Patients completely rely on healthcare providers and hospitals whenever they face any physical or mental issues. So they go online and try to find the best hospital with as many reviews as possible from the previous patients. A hospital’s online reputation can increase patient trust in the treatment process and the provider itself. So, online reputation management leads to better treatment results and improves patient trust in the healthcare provider.
Increase new patient appointments
As the quality and quantity of reviews increase for any hospital, their online presence strengthens, visibility increases, hence new patient appointments increase.
With enhanced reputation management for healthcare comes quality and quantity of patients. Patients with peculiar issues would trust the healthcare organizations and the hospital would be able to take on more and more bizarre and challenging cases.
Build lasting relationships with patients
Healthcare providers offer their patients the best treatment plans to amplify their experience. Building good relationships and a trustworthy reputation depends a lot on the patient’s experience and good patient care. Now the patient would again and again visit the same hospital for treatment due to the good impression that has been left on his mind. Thus, online reputation management for Hospitals and in turn for healthcare providers leads to better lasting patient-provider relationships.
Boost sales
Online reputation management for hospitals increases online visibility and word-of-mouth advertising. Newer patients go online and search for reviews about a particular hospital. After being satisfied with good reviews, they head to hospitals for treatment. If they have a pleasant patient experience, they leave good reviews and pass on word of mouth to their associated individuals. This leads to the incoming of more patients with different health issues to any healthcare practice causing a boost in sales.
The same goes for healthcare providers. With the usage of online reputation management tools, They can increase their visibility among patients. They can easily interact with the patient via two-way texting and send them feedback links to get their honest review about the provider’s treatment methods.
Positive brand image online
Online reputation management for hospitals is key to building a positive brand image online and boosting business growth. Many healthcare practices have benefited from this tactic in terms of sales. With positive online reviews and detailed patient case studies, more and more individuals would be able to learn and understand the vision of the hospital, their patient care techniques, and their overall brand image. So with the help of easy online reputation management strategies, hospitals can establish a positive brand image.
Improve customer base
With a positive online reputation and skills in treatment case studies, healthcare practices and larger hospitals can easily attract patients with difficult and peculiar cases. They can improve the loyalty of their older patients and help build a better customer base. Such patients with positive treatment experiences would readily share their journey both online and offline leading to more brand exposure for the business.
How To Boost Online Reputation For Hospitals
Want to learn how to use online reputation management for Hospitals to boost their sales and stay ahead of the curve, then keep reading!
Manage patient reviews
Your patients might leave reviews on different sites across the internet. So, you need an online reputation management software like Emitrr to collect patient feedback from all other social media sites and showcase them from a single platform. This way you would be much more aware of the patient’s thoughts about the treatment and facilities provided by you during their visit.
Send review requests regularly
Healthcare providers must show agility when it comes to collecting reviews. Immediate feedback requests allow patients to express their immediate emotions after the complete treatment. Otherwise, patients might get busy with their schedules and forget to respond quickly. You can make the task of sending review requests easier by using online reputation management software like Emitrr.
With the Emitrr platform, you can easily automate review requests and send them in bulk using broadcast message features. You can even assign this task to another teammate for enhanced productivity.
Respond to reviews
The most crucial part of handling reputation management for hospitals is to learn how to respond to reviews. The patients have the free will to respond both, positively and negatively to any healthcare practice. However, the hospitals should take such reviews as constructive criticism, analyze them, and try to politely solve any customer’s doubt in any of the reviews. Responding to reviews should be done with critical thinking. Many times, patients read replies or low-rated reviews and form a judgment about the provider. So, it’s important to handle all kinds of reviews for hospital reputation management.
Collect reviews and feedback from multiple review sources
Getting patient reviews from just Google is not all enough in today’s competitive era. You need to engage your patients creatively by offering them different, popular sites to leave reviews on. This also helps in increasing your search visibility as a healthcare provider.
Some of the best sites for leaving reviews and enhancing Online reputation management for healthcare providers are:
- Yelp
- Healthgrades
- WebMD
Focus on acquiring positive reviews
Online reputation management for hospitals really enhances their brand image. So the hospital should take steps to engage with customers and make them fill out survey forms and reviews across different sites. The healthcare management should collect all the positive reviews and showcase them to win patient’s trust. These positive reviews can also serve as testimonials for case studies reflecting how effective the treatment plans are of the hospitals. This way the hospitals would achieve a better online reputation for hospitals.
Leverage patient satisfaction surveys to amplify reputation
To understand patients’ opinions about different hospitals, it’s important to get patient satisfaction surveys done. By using patient satisfaction surveys, you would become more aware of your strengths and weaknesses in terms of patient care and other services. In case anyone leaves negative feedback, you will be informed about the areas of improvement. This way you would be able to work for the hospital’s online reputation management effectively. You can use HCAHPS. Improving your HCAHPS score would mean an improved reputation for the healthcare practice.
Ensure Patient Confidentiality throughout reputation response activities
While talking about online reputation management, it’s important to understand that patients don’t like their sensitive information being leaked or any kind of data breach taking place. These activities leave a negative impression on the hospital’s reputation. So be sure to not include any PHI information in your responses. Also, all the responses must be in accordance with the HIPAA guidelines.
Send prompt and personalized responses
Prompt and personalized responses can be very polite while sending review responses to patients. Any individual patient shares his experience with the healthcare providers through reviews. So adding a personal touch to review responses can be very advantageous for a hospital’s online reputation management.
Actively Monitor Reviews
The amount of reviews any hospital receives is difficult to manage. However, the reviews also need active monitoring to make sure every review has been responded to correctly and politely. This process also helps identify some negative reviews. Therefore, you can have reputation management software that encompasses capabilities like tasks and ticketing for better online review management. One such software is Emitrr.
The Emitrr platform as a hospital reputation management software lets you assign reviews to certain team members or raise tickets ensuring that urgent reviews are tended to immediately. So healthcare professionals can focus more on the patients and their problems.
Display Reviews where you need them
After achieving review, turn them into testimonials make sure to present those on your important websites, review sites, and inside the hospital to make sure that they can see what your previous patients say about you. These steps can significantly elevate the online reputation of hospitals.
How To Handle Reviews For Online Reputation Management For Hospitals?
Reviews form the backbone of any hospital’s online and offline reputation among targeted audiences. That’s why hospitals must understand how to handle both positive and negative reviews. `
How to Handle Positive Reviews
- Expressing gratitude is the most important step when any hospital receives positive feedback. A simple message like “Thank you for your kind words” can be sufficient and polite toward patients
- Maintaining HIPAA Compliance: It’s very important that when any healthcare professional replies to any review, they must maintain HIPAA compliance. Their replies should not contain any PHI of patients or any other detail that leads to HIPAA violation
- Tell your patients to “Visit us whenever you need healthcare support in the future” to make them feel welcomed and valued.
- Sharing the reviews with your Staff: You must share positive reviews with your other colleagues and staff to increase their morale and make them feel more passionate about their job
How to Handle Negative Reviews
- Acknowledge the negative feedback: Even if you disagree with the negative feedback of your patient, act sensibly and try to empathize with the patient’s experience. Avoid causing conflict by using sentences like, “We are sorry to hear about your experience.”
- Be proactive, not reactive: Never react too harshly or in a super excited manner to any positive or negative reviews. When it’s a positive review, try to show gratitude with a thank you politely. When comes to negative reviews never react rudely to any of the patients. Instead, ask what went wrong in their patient experience and try to fix their problem asap
- Do not let negative online review responses affect your work: Many times you would come across negative reviews from any patient who came to visit your hospital practice. The patient might say impolite words in their review. In such cases, you can’t lose your cool. As a hospital provider in general, you should focus on solving the patient’s problem. You should not let any negative review get to you or your mind. Instead, keep working on making better patient experience strategies
- Offer to resolve the issue offline: If in case the patient has put a negative review, then the healthcare practice should offer to resolve his problems offline over a text or call. Getting in touch with a patient who had an unpleasant experience can improve his opinion. After resolving his issue, the healthcare providers can even ask for a constructive review
Why Responding Is Important For Google?
Responding to patient reviews is good for visibility in Google’s search engine. Patient review responses are not limited to patient satisfaction and care but are also crucial from Google’s perspective. Search engines tend to favor practices that have a high rating and that interact with their patients. So responding to reviews on Google can be one of the key factors for better rankings in Google’s SERP.
Use AI Templates
If it’s difficult for the hospital providers or staff to reply to many patients online then you can take the help of AI templates. AI templates let you customize review request templates or responses effectively within seconds.
Common Pitfalls To Avoid While Handling Online Reviews
Overlooking small review sites
Sometimes the patients might leave reviews on small review sites. So don’t make the mistake of overlooking them. Instead, check whether it’s a positive or negative review and definitely respond accordingly. Every review is crucial while focusing on online reputation management for hospitals and practices.
Engaging in arguments online with patients
Whether you are a healthcare provider or a healthcare practice, you should never engage in arguments with patients online. Such arguments can always backfire, tarnishing your online reputation. Instead, use your cool and try to reason with the patient, understanding their issues offline via a call or text.
Ignoring the power of local SEO for medical practices
The local SEO helps in increasing the visibility of your medical practice in the Google search index and brings more organic traffic to your page. That is why using local SEO is also a crucial step for maintaining the online reputation of hospitals.
Neglecting Updates on Medical Certifications or Achievements
Sharing the laurels and achievements can add credibility to the hospital. The healthcare professionals should show their medical certifications and awards both online and offline to win patient’s trust
Underestimating the importance of personalized responses
The easiest way to keep your patients loyal to you and your healthcare practice is by personal interaction. That’s why doing personalized responses to patient reviews builds better patient-hospital relationships. With personalized responses, you can understand your patient and his needs better.
How Reputation Management Systems Can Boost Online Reputation For Hospitals
Automate the review management process
Automate the entire process of collecting and responding to reviews easily using any reputation management software. You can easily reply to all your reviews from one single platform to never miss any patient reviews. One such software that supports these features is Emitrr. You can easily send automated SMS to patients requesting reviews.
Collect your reviews from all different platforms
Use all different review platforms such as Google, Facebook, Yelp, Healthgrades, and WebMD to collect and generate reviews. Collect reviews smartly from the same patient on different platforms. Redirect your same patients to different review platforms for getting new reviews.
Monitor reviews effectively
Monitoring review is another essential task for a hospital provider’s reputation management. Monitoring reviews and analyzing them gives a better picture of what patients are happy about in the healthcare practice. You can respond and deal with negative reviews effectively using review monitoring.
Use Review Request Templates
By using any reputation management software, you can also utilize efficient review request templates for patient reviews. With review request templates, you can save time in creating templates from nothing and focus more on collecting and generating reviews for building a better online reputation.
How To Improve Online Reputation Of Hospitals Using Emitrr
The Emitrr software offers a lot of reputation-enhancing capabilities to support your healthcare business growth. Let’s take a look at how Emitrr improves the hospital’s online reputation management:
Create review request threads with Emitrr
If you wish to create a review request with Emitrr, you just need to follow a few simple steps
- Head to Emitrr’s dashboard.
- Select New message
- Here you are presented with two options:
- Create a new message from scratch
- Select any message templates from the already provided templates
- Select names from your contact list, you can even send SMS to multiple recipients at once
- Hit send or schedule it for later.
Use Emitrr for sending review responses
- With Emitrr, you can respond to reviews in two different ways:
- Head to Reputation → Reviews. There you’ll see all your reviews from across different channels.
- Now you will be able to see the “reply” button and “delete” button. You can respond to the review, delete it, and even share it on Facebook.
- You can also create a task and assign this review response to some other team member.
Automate review responses
- You can select the Automate Review response option to simplify your task further.
- Follow the steps: Settings → Reputation Management → Review Settings
- Now you can see the option to set replies to reviews for different channels
- Click save and you are good to go!
Track and analyze reputation metrics with Emitrr
- With Emitrr you can check the total number of reviews.
- You can filter the reviews by location, review source, and rating
- Select the filters and get a detailed analysis!
Why Emitrr Is The Best Online Reputation Management System For Hospitals?
Drive reviews for both healthcare practice and healthcare providers
Emitrr’s capabilities of automating simple review requests, automating responses, and tracking response metrics help both the healthcare practice and healthcare providers in increasing their efficiency.
Integrate with PMS to automate review requests as soon as patients check out
Get easy integration with the Patient Management system (PMS) and send out review requests to your patients as soon as they check out with Emitrr. Never miss a chance to garner review and enhance the reputation of your healthcare practice with Emitrr
Send Automated review requests via SMS
Emitrr offers you an automated review request option. This feature makes your task of asking for a review via text easier and more efficient.
Set up review alerts from different platforms
Never miss a chance to collect and reply to your patient reviews with the Emitrr platform. Emitrr lets you set up review alerts for different platforms so that you are notified whenever a patient posts a review about you instantly!
Get reviews from review channels under one platform
Manage and track your reviews better with Emitrr. The platform offers amazing hospital reputation management by gathering all your reviews posted across different sites such as Google, WebMD, etc. under one single dashboard for better review management.
Get patients to write reviews for your practice across different sites
Ask your regular patients to write reviews across different review sites by sending them links. Identify the same patients and get them to write reviews about their patient experience across different sites for better outreach and visibility.
Use available review SMS templates to send requests instantly
Choose from hundreds of review requests SMS templates available at the Emitrr platform and save time while sending review requests.
Monitor reviews and filter them based on location, review source, and rating
Monitor, analyze, and filter out reviews based on location, review source, and rating. Using Emitrr, handle and track your review responses effectively to get insights.
Engage with patients via two-way texting
Easily engage with patients, ask them for reviews, send them surveys, and review links using Emitrr’s two-way texting capability.
Case Study: Pinnacle Medical Group saw Growth In Reviews and Online Reputation with Emitrr
- The Pinnacle Medical Group is a medical practice with 5 different locations. They offer diverse medical services that include family medicine, urgent care, women’s health, pediatrics, and more.
- Their main concern was the issue they were facing a challenge with their electronic medical record (EMR) system and communication with patients. Patients wanted to communicate via text message to save time. But Pinnacle was struggling to respond to their needs effectively.
- Emitrr’s capabilities were put to use. Using Emitrr’s automation capabilities, Patient Communication was automated along with Patient Reviews automation.
- Results: Emitrr automated review collection via text request and easily received more than 90 reviews within just three days with huge improvements in online ratings across locations. There was a 3X growth in reviews.
- Read the full story here!
Frequently Asked Questions
Online reputation management for hospitals utilizes different strategies and techniques to improve the brand image, visibility, and overall reputation of a particular hospital provider or healthcare practice in general amongst the targeted audience. The hospital reputation management system is responsible for patient outreach, building relationships, and business growth.
The Emitrr software is one of the best and most trusted reputation management software in the market. Emitrr offers capable features like automating review requests, handling patient reviews, and analyzing review responses in just a few simple clicks. This makes Emitrr ahead of its curve.
SEO for hospitals comes under the umbrella term of ‘online reputation management for hospitals’. Local SEO is also a part of the hospital reputation management strategy. SEO also helps in improving the online reputation by increasing visibility and brand image in Google searches.
If you have decided to switch to Emitrr for its amazing online reputation management solution for hospitals and healthcare providers, then you just need to contact Emitrr’s technical support team. Complete the formality and Emitrr’s technical team will take care of the software training, integrations, and other specifications.
Conclusion
Now that you have this comprehensive guide on how to enhance online reputation management for hospitals and generate patient reviews, It’s time for you to decide on the right software. Well, we would suggest the highly capable Emitrr platform. Head to Emitrr to book a demo and learn more about how reviews and review tracking metrics bring more business to your healthcare practice!
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