Medical practices need to elevate their patient experience to cater to the requirements of the new generation of patients. Adapting a digitally enabled patient experience model and improving your online presence are vital in keeping up with the rapidly changing standards of modern healthcare.
Patient experience is the healthcare industry’s equivalent of customer-centricity in the business world. In the same way a brand modifies their marketing approach to improve sales, medical practices focus on providing the best patient experience to become the chosen healthcare provider for more people.
A medical practice wouldn’t advertise the way a business does, and instead bring in new patients through healthcare reputation management strategies that showcase the exceptional patient experience you provide.
Improving the patient experience is about evaluating the patient’s journey and ensuring your patient is delighted in every step — from appointment booking to minute details like greeting them by name. As your patient’s priorities continue to change, your patient experience should evolve.
Studies show that health is more of a priority for millennials than previous generations, with some reports labeling them as the “health and wellness generation.” Because many people rely on the internet to find what they need, healthcare providers have a massive opportunity to grow their medical practices through online reputation management for doctors and hospitals.
A 2018 PatientPop survey reported around 74.6 percent of people looked online for medical or dental care. As healthcare becomes increasingly relevant and more people look for doctors online, you need a robust healthcare online reputation management strategy to safeguard your professional image.
Medical reputation management services leverage your positive online reviews to attract new patients and improve patient retention. Your patient’s feedback holds much power — they can either vouch for your standards of care or give you constructive criticism based on first-hand accounts, both equally valuable to your practice. Monitoring your online reviews offers you a roadmap to providing the best patient experience.
In this blog, we talk about how positive reviews benefit your healthcare reputation and specific ways to improve your patient experience. We discuss:
• Understanding patient experience and online reviews
• 10 ways to enhance patient experience and earn positive reviews
• How to repair a damaged online healthcare reputation
• Crafting a robust healthcare reputation management strategy
Understanding Patient Experience and Online Reviews
Siemens Healthineers, a medical technology company, sponsored a Harvard Business Review (HBR) whitepaper on why patient experience is vital for the healthcare industry. In it, Dr. Ralph Wiegner, Head of Improving Patient Experience, defines patient experience as “the sum of all interactions influencing patient perceptions across the continuum of care.”
The HBR article claims that “the future of the global healthcare market lies in delivering high-value care that concentrates on the patient experience.” To future-proof your medical practice, you need to delight your patients in all your interactions and make your superior patient experience known to a broader audience.
Online reviews speak to your standards of care through the testimonies of your past and existing patients. Because active patient choices can impact more than 60 percent of healthcare spending, positively influencing their perception of your practice through physician online reputation management brings profitable results.
A 2018 ReviewTrackers survey found that around 27 percent of consumers were likely to leave a review after a positive experience with a primary care physician. Physician reputation management leverages your positive reviews to put your patient experience in the best light.
In a nutshell, enhancing your patient experience encourages much-needed online reviews for your practice.
10 Ways to Enhance Patient Experience and Earn Positive Reviews
Siemens Healthineers’ HBR whitepaper explained that improving the patient experience requires a holistic perspective on the entire patient journey and attention to every interaction between patient and provider. Holistic reputation management for doctors puts your best foot forward in all your patient touchpoints.
Here are 10 actionable tips to ensure the best experience for your patients before, during and after appointments:
1. Make It Easy to Find You
A patient wanting to find you online should be able to do so with ease. Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques bring you to the top of search results — and having more reviews helps. Healthcare online reputation management increases your chances of attracting new patients by creating a robust online presence.
2. Provide Key Information Online
When a prospective patient is seeking information from a hospital online, you need to answer all of their pertinent questions quickly — the name, location and contact details of the doctor they need.
It’s common for patients to know a hospital nearby but not have a specific doctor. Once needed, they would look for the hospital’s website for doctor information. With hospital reputation management at play, your hospital ranks on featured local search results (called the Google 3-Pack) with up-to-date contact details, positive reviews and a high star rating — impressing them with helpful information even before opening your website.
Keep the patient experience smooth by ensuring your website navigation is intuitive — answering all of their pertinent questions quickly and bringing them directly to the doctor information they need. Hospital reputation management tools maximize your website traffic by featuring your patient testimonials on your homepage.
3. Have a Seamless Appointment Booking Process
Booking an appointment is the desired action you want the user to take on your website — investing in online appointment booking tools is worth it. The patient can view your availability, schedule an appointment and cancel one if needed. If you prefer receiving calls, medical reputation management services include updating your Google My Business (GMB) listing for your patients to call you with one click.
4. Greet Them Warmly
More than 50 percent of patients want to be greeted by their medical service providers by their first name. Psychologist Sam Sommers discovered the power of “hello” through a student’s online review appreciating his warm reception. Ensuring your patients feel accommodated by every employee at your facility, from front desk staff to security guards, goes a long way for medical reputation management.
5. Minimize Waiting Time
Reduce your patient’s waiting time in every way possible. Improve your scheduling and find any steps that can be completed in advance. Eighty-five percent of patients consider a reasonable wait time very important to their experience. Make waiting more bearable and comfortable by providing drinks and having a television or reading materials.
6. Show Compassion
Patients value compassion and feeling like their doctor cares. Listening intently, keeping notes (especially for patients doing regular visits) and making an effort to understand your patient improves their experience of your facility and your service.
A revolutionary book called “Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence That Caring Makes a Difference,” written by physician scientists Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli, provides astonishing data on the healing power of compassion and how it is the “wonder drug of the 21st century” — a concept becoming increasingly relevant to online reputation management for doctors.
7. Wrap Up Quickly
The patient experience does not end after their consultation. Some patients might need to pay, get a prescription or visit another doctor, which can be chaotic in a hospital setting. Evaluating your patient journey and wrapping up their experience as quickly as possible is essential to safeguarding online reputation management for hospitals and similar medical institutions.
8. Leverage Technology
A 2019 Accenture survey reveals younger people are dissatisfied with traditional healthcare and all patients are more willing to try non-traditional services such as virtual health and digital therapeutics. In fact, more than half of patients indicated they expect digital capabilities.
Offer online consultations and e-prescriptions for an elevated and modern patient experience. Become known as a technology-driven practice and feature your best services through healthcare online reputation management.
9. Get Your Team on Board
An HBR article says “improving the patient experience is a multifaceted undertaking that requires cooperation at all levels of a healthcare organization, from the C-Suite to the front lines of patient care.” Ingraining the value of patient experience in your team culture inevitably wins positive reviews and medical reputation management success.
10. Collect Feedback and Improve
To acquire and retain new patients, it’s necessary to commit to continuously improving your patient experience. Whether it’s reputation management for doctors or hospital online reputation management, the focus is the cycle of improvement — collecting feedback, putting it into action and showcasing your impressive service quality.
Nearly 70 percent of people consider a positive online reputation to be extremely important when choosing a healthcare provider, according to a PatientPop report.
Here’s the good news: Most patients leave positive reviews for healthcare providers. Of course, it’s impossible to avoid negative feedback entirely, but you can keep it to a minimum and actively improve your image through medical reputation management services.
How to Repair a Damaged Online Healthcare Reputation
Doctors and hospitals get negative feedback as commonly as any other industry — difficulties in scheduling, long waiting periods and insurance issues are among the most common reasons patients leave negative reviews. But the unique challenge in physician online reputation management is how to deal with negative feedback.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations prohibit any form of patient information disclosure. Doctors and hospitals cannot respond to negative feedback in a way that reveals any information about patient-doctor interactions.
The sensitivities surrounding the management of negative feedback lead doctors to rely on physician online reputation management firms for online reputation repair services. Trusting physician reputation management experts means avoiding HIPAA violations while improving the public’s perception of your practice.
This becomes all the more important in online reputation management for hospitals because of the volume of patients you receive. Negative feedback that adds up can seriously harm your practice, so you need a focused strategy for online reputation repair that is proactive and HIPAA compliant.
So, what’s the benefit of online reputation management for doctors? Addressing your negative feedback nearly doubles your patient satisfaction rate.
Expert physician reputation management methods include conducting a revi
ew audit, crafting human responses to negative feedback and using tactics that actively encourage five-star reviews to improve your average review rating.
Crafting a Robust Healthcare Reputation Management Strategy
Doctors and hospitals get negative feedback as commonly as any other industry — difficulties in scheduling, long waiting periods and insurance issues are among the most common reasons patients leave negative reviews. But the unique challenge in physician online reputation management is how to deal with negative feedback.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations prohibit any form of patient information disclosure. Doctors and hospitals cannot respond to negative feedback in a way that reveals any information about patient-doctor interactions.
The sensitivities surrounding the management of negative feedback lead doctors to rely on physician online reputation management firms for online reputation repair services. Trusting physician reputation management experts means avoiding HIPAA violations while improving the public’s perception of your practice.
This becomes all the more important in online reputation management for hospitals because of the volume of patients you receive. Negative feedback that adds up can seriously harm your practice, so you need a focused strategy for online reputation repair that is proactive and HIPAA compliant.
So, what’s the benefit of online reputation management for doctors? Addressing your negative feedback nearly doubles your patient satisfaction rate.
Expert physician reputation management methods include conducting a review audit, crafting human responses to negative feedback and using tactics that actively encourage five-star reviews to improve your average review rating.
Crafting a Robust Healthcare Reputation Management Strategy
Medical reputation management plays a crucial role in ensuring a positive patient experience by improving your trust factors, managing your online feedback and putting a spotlight on the best of what your medical practice has to offer.
Hospital online reputation management is more than increasing the quantity and quality of your online reviews. It’s about improving your patient experience at its core.
Hospital online reputation management best practices need to trickle down from a top-level hospital reputation management strategy down to every person in your organization.
Seventy-six percent of customers will leave a review if you ask. We craft a review generation strategy that continuously collects feedback and contributes significantly to improving your patient experience.
Rize Reviews uniquely offers 100 percent done-for-you services and unmatched expertise in online reputation management for hospitals and medical practices. Our reputation management software automates your review acquisition and can send review and non-review email and SMS communications.
Our technology makes monitoring and responding to your reviews easy — and our reputation managers guarantee strict compliance with HIPAA regulations. We helped a neuroscience group practice generate 121 new reviews and increase the review scores of 12 of their 15 doctors.
Contact Rize Reviews for a free online reputation audit and begin reaping the benefits of reputation management for doctors and hospitals today.
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