11 Dec How does the boom of online reviews affect medical providers?
Online reviews have become a part of all different types of services and products. It is no surprise that patients also use online reviews to assess potential healthcare providers as well. These reviews will affect your image and reputation and ultimately affect your bottom line. A large portion of Americans say that online reviews affect their choice when choosing physicians. Since these reviews can deeply affect the digital presence of any healthcare provider, online reviews have become an integral part of any healthcare marketing strategy. Reach out to us at Prescription PR and see how we can help manage your online reputation and improve your healthcare marketing strategy.
Online Reviews:
People post online reviews about products or services like restaurants to outline their experience, and if positive might even recommend it to others. In the same idea, patients leave reviews of healthcare providers they experience. These can be positive or negative, with positive reviews outlining a great experience, stay, help, and/or cleanliness. These positive reviews help spread a positive image of your practice and improve your reputation; the patient might even recommend your offices to other patients.
Patients who have a less pleasurable experience at your office might instead leave a negative review. But the point of online reviews isn’t to increase stress levels for physicians and healthcare offices. The idea is that these negative reviews can be honest and constructive feedback points from patients. The healthcare providers can then improve the areas addressed in the reviews to create a better experience for their patients, leading to higher patient satisfaction and more positive reviews, which reflect the healthcare office’s service and their improvements. Then this turnaround leads to more patients for the healthcare provider, resulting in a better situation for both patients and physicians. For an in-depth healthcare marketing strategy that can use online reviews to improve your online presence, contact us at Prescription PR.
Optimizing Online Reviews:
Receiving a bad review does not spell demise for your practice. A bad review can happen for any of numerous reasons. The best way to optimize online reviews and remove the worry of a bad review affecting your practice is to ask more patients to leave a review. Not all patients think to leave a review after visiting an office, so ask patients to leave a review when you can. One tool that can help is a healthy patient platform or any end-to-end tool that lets healthcare providers communicate with patients. By having a larger sample size, those few offshoot negative reviews lose their impact and relevance to your service.
While online reviews can be intimidating, in the end, proper use of tools like online reputation management can be a huge boon to a physician’s practice. With our world becoming more fast-paced and online driven, you can’t shy away from online reviews, marketing, and reputation-building. Reach out to us at Prescription PR to take advantage of all the tools digital marketing offers for your practice, and create a healthcare marketing strategy that will boost your business.