Through a growing number of business and healthcare review websites, patients are speaking openly about their healthcare experiences, and in a candid manner.  From the best of experiences to the worst, your patients have a voice online…and they are using it.

The opportunities and threats that lie within online reviews is staggering.  Several 5-star ratings and your practice stands clearly apart from the crowd.  One or two bad ones however, and online window shoppers might decide that taking a chance on your practice isn’t going to make their “to-do” list.

The good news is that you likely have many patients in your practice this very day who would be honored to provide you with the highest of online marks…if they only knew where to start.

The trick is to (1) Know what your patients are already saying, and to (2) make sure your most pleased patients are speaking about you online.

And how do you start, you ask?  It’s easy.

Step 1: Know what your patients are saying

Visit the most popular online review sites, and see first-hand what is being said about your practice.  Many sites exist, and we recommend you stick with the big ones, at least to start.  General sites like Yahoo Local, Google Maps, Yelp, and Angie’s List are some of the most popular.

Following this, healthcare specific sites such as HealthGrades, RateMD’s, and Vitals.com are good places to look for categorical reviews of your performance by your patients.

And if you’re not seeing reviews of yourself or your practice, don’t feel left out.  It’s simply time to proceed to Step 2 and start building your online reputation.

Step 2: Get your pleased patients talking

This part is easier than you might think.  Simply start by educating your Internet-savvy patients as to the benefit of online feedback for your practice.  You’ll be surprised at how quickly your patients will flock to tell the masses about how you’ve cared for them, helped their family, or saved their life.  If you want to make it a step easier, provide links to popular review sites from your website.  Help them out by providing these links, and they’ll be a-clicking away in no time.

Everybody wants cheap advertising, and leveraging the benefit of online reviews is about as cheap as it gets.  Don’t forget however, that online reviews work both ways.  For every possible good remark, there is also the potential for a bad, which can work in the wrong direction for your practice.  Putting some time and energy into making sure your practice’s online reputation is a good one is an investment well made.

As always, we’re here to help, and if you have any questions about how to build your 5-star online rating, or to clean up online reputations that need some work, know that we’re just a call or click away.

Through a growing number of business and healthcare review websites, patients are speaking openly about their healthcare experiences, and in a candid manner. From the best of experiences to the worst, your patients have a voice online…and they are using it.

The opportunities and threats that lie within online reviews is staggering. Several 5-star ratings and your practice stands clearly apart from the crowd. One or two bad ones however, and online window shoppers might decide that taking a chance on your practice isn’t going to make their “to-do” list.

The good news is that you likely have many patients in your practice this very day who would be honored to provide you with the highest of online marks…if they only knew where to start.

The trick is to (1) Know what your patients are already saying, and to (2) make sure your most pleased patients are speaking about you online.

And how do you start, you ask? It’s easy.

Step 1: Know what your patients are saying
Visit the most popular online review sites, and see first-hand what is being said about your practice. Many sites exist, and we recommend you stick with the big ones, at least to start. General sites like Yahoo Local, Google Maps, Yelp, and Angie’s List are some of the most popular.

Following this, healthcare specific sites such as HealthGrades, RateMD’s, and Vitals.com are good places to look for categorical reviews of your performance by your patients.

And if you’re not seeing reviews of yourself or your practice, don’t feel left out. It’s simply time to proceed to Step 2 and start building your online reputation.

Step 2: Get your pleased patients talking
This part is easier than you might think. Simply start by educating your Internet-savvy patients as to the benefit of online feedback for your practice. You’ll be surprised at how quickly your patients will flock to tell the masses about how you’ve cared for them, helped their family, or saved their life. If you want to make it a step easier, provide links to popular review sites from your website. Help them out by providing these links, and they’ll be a-clicking away in no time.

Everybody wants cheap advertising, and leveraging the benefit of online reviews is about as cheap as it gets. Don’t forget however, that online reviews work both ways. For every possible good remark, there is also the potential for a bad, which can work in the wrong direction for your practice. Putting some time and energy into making sure your practice’s online reputation is a good one is an investment well made.

As always, we’re here to help, and if you have any questions about how to build your 5-star online rating, or to clean up online reputations that need some work, know that we’re just a call or click away.

_________________

Tannus Quatre PT, MBA is a private practice consultant and principal with Vantage Clinical Solutions, Inc., a nationwide healthcare consulting and management firm located in Bend, OR and Denver, CO.  Tannus specializes in the areas of healthcare marketing, strategy, and finance, and can be reached through the Vantage Clinical Solutions website.

Some physicians argue that online reviews can unfairly tarnish one’s hard-earned reputation, perhaps by patients who may have never even stepped foot into a physician’s office.  Patient advocate groups however, claim that online physician reviews provide patients with an ever-important venue through which to help others make wise decisions about whom they seek for care.

Not without flaws, I do think that online physician reviews are a good idea.  There’s a number of reasons for this, but atop the list lies simply our first amendment.  We are free to speak our minds, and within this falls our ability to use the Internet to tell others of how great or how lousy our doctor (or auto mechanic) may be.  This right can obviously be perverted by a physician’s competitor who decides to leave an anonymous bad review, or by a non-patient who wishes to defame the reputation of a physician with whom she or he holds an unrelated grudge.  Well, guess what…the same can be said for any other facet of the information age in which we live, and restricting speech to prevent the misuse of this important and empowering technology is itself a perverted notion.

Some physician groups advocate that physicians should enter into contracts with their patients that would prohibit the use of online reviews for rating said physicians.  I strongly disagree.  The physicians cite privacy as the rationale for this tactic, implying that the patient-physician relationship should be one of two-way confidentiality.  As a physician won’t speak of the encounter with others, nor should the patient.  This misses the entire point of patient confidentiality, which protects us [as patients] from the disclosure of our most personal medical conditions to others without our consent.  In no way should this reciprocally protect a physician from providing bad service or subpar medical care.

As a physical therapist and business owner myself, I understand the rules of engagement for my business and/or clinical behaviors.  I also understand that others may not play by the same rules, and have the potential to use tools such as online review sites unfairly against me or any one of my clients.  This doesn’t stop me from doing business though, and doesn’t give me cause to require that anyone that I do business with adhere to a set of restrictive rules that limit their ability to speak openly about their dealings with me.  It’s what I signed up for when I became a licensed provider, and it’s what I signed up for when entered into business.

This topic is widely debated and I appreciate the opportunity to share my view here.  I’d love to hear from others who have different viewpoints either directly through our contact page, or by commenting to this post.

For a great video from ABC News on the topic of online physician reviews, visit Grading Doctors Online – ABC News.

_________________

Tannus Quatre PT, MBA is a private practice consultant and principal with Vantage Clinical Solutions, Inc., a nationwide healthcare consulting and management firm located in Bend, OR and Denver, CO.  Tannus specializes in the areas of healthcare marketing, strategy, and finance, and can be reached through the Vantage Clinical Solutions website.

As more people are moving to the web to find information about healthcare providers (read my posts about online physician ratings here and here), it pays for private practice owners to know what is being said about their practice in online news publications and throughout the blogosphere.  With more and more print publications simultaneously funneling their news stories online, web searches now provide a means by which to search local print media who may be publishing information about a practice from recent press releases, sponsorships or other local news stories.

Practice owners and managers don’t have the time to search the Internet daily for news stories or commentary about their practice, but they do have the time to take advantage of Google Alerts in order to have Google scour the web for them.  With Google Alerts, you simply enter the keywords you’d like searched, enter in a frequency of which you’d like the results sent to you by email, and you’re done.  You’ll soon be getting email in your inbox telling you exactly what is being said about your practice online – a great way to keep tabs on your practice’s brand in a way that is efficient, easy and effective.

This article from BizGrowthNews provides some more information about the benefits of this great tool.

I recommend putting in place a once-a-day Google Alert which you can then review at the start of each day.

Items that feature in the news, in blogs or on the web can be included in the alert.