3-Steps to Improving Your Online Reputation and Your Practice

As my Mother use to say, we all have choices, and one of those choices is to acknowledge the importance of online reviews. In today’s world, it's acceptance or peril.

Recently we have been connecting a growth mindset to many areas of a practice and this week we will apply a growth mindset to online reviews.

Many feel that physicians are unfairly critiqued online but according to Healthcare Finance, patients are almost twice as likely to give doctors good marks online as poor ones. Of 34,748 online patient reviews, 66% of them were five stars.

Improving an online reputation starts with developing a growth mindset to manage online reviews. From a one to a five-star review, there is something to learn from a patient’s feedback.

Step One: Understand that online reviews are a critical component of managing a successful practice. According to ReviewTrackers, 72% of patients use reviews on doctor rating sites as the first step to finding a new doctor. New patient growth is an important revenue driver and embracing the correlation between your online reputation and achieving new patient goals is the first step.

Step Two: Applying a growth mindset to reviews, allows you to identify the things that are positively and negatively impacting the patient experience. This information can be used to celebrate and also educate your staff. The comments from reviews often provide valuable insight into the patient experience. When those statements reflect a pattern, “the Dr. was running behind by 45 minutes, I was placed in an exam room for almost an hour before I was seen by the Dr.” These comments demonstrate a need to review the time allotted for each visit type and also remind the staff and ourselves of the impact of time management on the patient experience.

Step Three: Understand that negative reviews will occur but if you are embracing all components of a reputation management program, the impact will have a ripple effect instead of a tsunami. Developing a consistent process for managing reviews should include a request process from patients that involves all staff members. Patients must be at an appropriate stage of care when such requests are made.

Ensure that you and your staff are consistently reviewing online reviews. Learning from patients is a critical component of medicine and managing online reviews with a growth mindset will help you to build a healthier practice.

If you are ready to apply a growth mindset to your practice and strengthen your practice infrastructure, please contact me at smays@impactpracticeconsultants.com