Vanguard’s CEO offers tips for online reputation management
Ron King shares his wisdom on healthcare marketing on MedPage Today, a trusted source of medical news. In this video he addresses the relatively new field in public relations called online reputation management.
How often do patients turn to online reviews of doctors? Can you ignore online reviews? How should you respond? Ron discusses these questions and dishes out good advice.
Watch the video on MedPage Today
Video transcript
Today we’re going to explore the subject of online reviews of doctors by patients and what to do about negative and inaccurate comments on the internet. This is a hot topic.
A recent explosion of online reviews of not just doctors but restaurants, hotels and businesses in general has led to the birth of a new field of specialty in public relations called online reputation management.
The first point to make about online reviews is that they’re not going away. According to a study by the accounting and consulting firm Price Waterhouse Coopers, about half of all Americans – more than 150 million – have read healthcare reviews, and two-thirds of those have used digital reviews for decision making in their healthcare. This indicates that approximately 1 in 3 Americans are relying on internet reviews for making important choices of healthcare providers.
A second point to make is that online reviews usually show up on page 1 of search engine results whenever someone Googles a doctor’s name. Therefore, in the digital world, whatever a patient says about a physician on the internet tends to follow that doctor around.
For these reasons and others, it’s generally a bad idea to ignore critical online reviews. You may think a particular patient criticism is unfair and inaccurate. But others reading the complaint won’t know any other point of view unless you respond.
There are two ways to respond. One is to reach out to the patient privately via a phone call in hopes of resolving the complaint offline. In our experience as digital marketers and healthcare PR specialists, it’s surprising how often this leads to the complainer posting a second, positive review.
The second means of response is on the website where the criticism is posted. To be able to do this, you have to register on the website as the physician or business owner being reviewed. This process is usually easy by merely following prompts for claiming your identity on that site.
Now, when you respond to online patient reviews, you have to be very careful not to violate patient privacy standards and laws. You should not publicly comment on the patient’s own health history or experience, even if the patient has already revealed personal details. In fact, you really should not even acknowledge the complainer is a patient.
Instead, you should communicate two messages. First, acknowledge that the law prevents you from discussing individual cases publicly, but you nonetheless warmly welcome input in the goal of improving patient satisfaction. Then provide a name and phone number for the reviewer to call and further discuss his or her issues.
Second, if at all possible, you should cite general policies in your practice that help give your side of the story. For example, you can say that you ask the receptionist to notify waiting patients as much in advance as possible if a doctor is running more than 10 minutes late due to a medical urgency, but occasionally a substitute receptionist may not always follow through.
Another example is billing. The practice can’t always tell patients in advance which procedures and medications are covered under their insurance until the practice files a claim.
There’s more about how to handle negative online reviews on our website.
Meanwhile, in our next video blog we will cover some important no-no’s for responding to patient reviews.
Power to the patient
Good communication inside and outside the clinic allows for better treatment and happier patients.