Online reviews are your practice’s public image to everyone who has not been inside your clinic and interacted with your staff. Your most common ratings are what patients see when they type your practice name into a Google search. Your online reputation correlates to patient experience. If your patient experience is critically flawed, no amount of internet marketing will save your online reputation. Equally, many practices do an excellent job of caring for their patients, yet that remarkable care is invisible to the rest of the world.
Providing an outstanding patient experience both impacts and extends to online interaction. In other words, how you interact with your patient community online is part of their overall experience with your practice.
Practices sometimes view online review sites as a reputation liability, yet this very thought is the true liability. It is perilous to cling to control of public opinion in the age of ubiquitous transparency. Patients use online reviews to select their fertility centers, and the number is only increasing. Rapidly. Here is a look at the data:
1). The number of patients using online reviews jumped 68 percent from 2013 to 2014.
2). Among those who sought online physician ratings in the past year, 35 percent reported selecting a physician based on good ratings and 37 percent had avoided a physician with bad ratings.
3). The three most trusted review sites for healthcare professionals are Yelp, Healthgrades, and RateMDs.
4). Three and a half stars is the median rating for an RE on ratemds.com. Depending on the city where your practice is located, certain review sites are more relevant than others.
Online review sites are a tremendous improvement tool for your practice. Executing on the feedback from a range of reviewers puts your practice in a position to increase business rapidly. For example, if you have twenty seven reviews on yelp.com, and six of them say that a particular nurse made them feel outstanding, then you have a data source to make more educated personnel decisions. If your website is set up to convert new patients, you will be able to measure the success of the changes that you apply.