Poor reviews getting you down?
Has your practice gotten a bad review or reviews on a rate-your-doctor website? If not, then it’s in a very small and shrinking minority. Specialty medical practices are issuing more and more calls to us for help in addressing reviews and ratings of their physicians on websites such as Yelp.com, RateMDs.com and Healthgrades.com.
In a previous posting, I addressed the trend towards over-valuing Facebook in its power to attract new patients to a medical practice. Here I’d like to say the opposite about rate-your-doctor websites: they may be the hottest thing in social media for making or breaking a practice.
As a recent example, a friend was telling me just yesterday about her cross-country move to a new city two months ago. Soon after arrival, she booked an appointment with a primary physician in the new city. “But then I discovered this doctor had not one but two bad online reviews,” she related. “One would have been fine, perfectly acceptable. But multiple complaints made me suspect that there was a real problem.” She promptly cancelled the appointment and found another PCP with better reviews.
Okay, that’s a single anecdote. But wait, there’s plenty more evidence leading me to proclaim rate-your-doctor websites as hotter than Facebook:
- A sharp increase in the number of ratings of our client physicians.
- The frequency of practices asking our help in dealing with negative reviews.
- Data on visitors to the practice’s websites.
On the first point, we’ve been monitoring these sites for quite a while. A few years ago or even 12 months ago in some cases, our client physicians typically received a trickle of reviews by patients. The trickle has since grown to a steady stream. And in some cases, the stream has become a torrent, sometimes because of negative reviews.
On the second point, more and more clients are certain that certain negative reviews are the work of fiercely competitive physicians and/or disgruntled ex-employees – some of whom have gone to work for competitors. It’s often difficult to tell the difference between real patient reviews and flamers, of course. But some reviews are more overt hoaxes, sufficiently lacking in details and repetitiously vague in their complaints.
Numbers don’t lie
Thirdly, at MedMarketLink, we spend a lot of time analyzing website data for where visitors to our clients’ sites come from. At most, Facebook accounts for a mere 2 to 3 percent of visits to a practice’s site. That is, someone finds a medical practice’s Facebook page and then links to the practice website. This is reason enough for a specialty practice to have some presence on Facebook. But refrain from putting all your eggs in the FB basket.
While Yelp or RateMDs.com usually send smaller numbers of visits on an individual basis, logic tells us that this information is largely irrelevant. With more than 700 million users, Facebook is sending more people more places simply because it attracts more people.
Further, a patient on the verge of selecting a physician is more likely to focus on Yelp or RateMDs.com ratings after she has visited the practice website. The rate-your-doctor sites usually list so many physicians for each specialty that it’s difficult to gauge any indivual within the rather vanilla pages of this medium. Most display no photos of the doc (unless the doc pays for the privilege), scant detail on the practice overall, particularly the more personal look and feel of the practice that can be conveyed through a well-executed website.
In short, a visit to a rate-your-doctor site is one of the final stops before a patient contacts a practice for an appointment. A few pages on the review site simply cannot represent an organization as well as a practice’s website of dozens of pages (or, in the case of MedMarketLink clients, hundreds of pages).
Good enough for hotels & restaurants
In the previous blog posting, we discussed how a prospective patient might ask about the skills of a physician in hopes of getting accurate information. Actually, the prospective patient doesn’t even have to ask. A stranger volunteers the information enthusiastically, without being prompted. Or, rather, multitudes of strangers.
Most people know that rate-your-doctor websites work pretty much the same way as sites with customer ratings of hotels and restaurants. Anyone can say almost anything – anonymously, of course – about the business being rated. You need only establish a free account with one of these sites; then you login and hold forth on the business (or doctor) of your choice.
Rate-your-doctor sites require no evidence from any reviewer that she’s even met the physician subject of her critique. Yes, some sites have a few safeguards against flagrant abuses. For example, some sites employ human editors who troll for habitual “flamers,” or people who initiate extreme verbal attacks. In some cases these sites have removed the most hateful comments and banned the commenters.
But these are less-than-perfect safeguards, and the instigator can merely register with the site under a new identity. So is a medical practice helpless? Is there anything to be done to at least address the most flagrant untruths?
Managing online patient reviews
Naturally, a practice cannot control its reviews on rate-your-doctor sites. But a practice can most definitely influence the reviews through a combination of good clinical work, excellent customer service and proactive communications.
Furthermore, in some cases, a practice can directly address the most stinging reviews directly. Most rate-your-doctor websites allow physicians to establish personal accounts on the site. The websites do this usually in hopes of selling advertising to the docs. Nonetheless, most allow free registration of physicians, if for nothing else than to gather more marketing data.
For these sites, the registered physician often can communicate directly to the complainer and/or comment publicly on the complaint on the same web page. Sometimes this kind of interaction leads to a happy resolution for all, thereby transforming the complaint into glowing praise for the doctor and the practice.
In the same vein and also the bigger picture, let us not forget that excellent customer service includes excellent customer communications. Which brings me to a final point with admitted self interests: the MedMarketLink program includes components for both online and offline reputation management.
Notably, our online reputation management program combines (cleverly, if we may so) information technology techniques with public relations principles to boost doctor ratings. If you’re interested in learning more, we’d be happy to hear from you.
About Vanguard Communications
Since 1994, Vanguard Communications has provided specialty healthcare marketing with a strategy focused on patient education guaranteed to bring new patients to specialist physicians, physician assistants, nurses and therapists in private, university and hospital practices. Through its MedMarketLink program, Vanguard combines the disciplines of online and offline PR, strategic marketing and information technology for healthcare providers coast to coast.