Posted on March 25, 2021 in General
Encourage Patients to Leave Reviews for Your Medical Practice
Patient reviews are the modern-day word-of-mouth. Prospects now research practices online before ever setting foot in a waiting room. In fact, 72 percent of patients rely on online reviews to find a new healthcare provider.
Online reviews have the power to make or break your practice: it takes only a few bad apples to damage your reputation. Naturally, patients will find themselves wanting to share a negative or positive experience with friends, family, and other close contacts.
It’s also commonplace for them to turn to the internet to narrate their experiences to a wider audience. Positive reviews foster patient trust and heavily influence their decision to visit your practice. The opposite holds true for negative reviews.
Here are 20 online reputation statistics from Forbes that every business owner needs to know.
- Reviews and Consumer Choice
As mentioned earlier, the reviews a practice has directly impact consumer choice— 82 percent of consumers read online reviews to assess a healthcare provider. Additionally, 80 percent say reviews guide their choice of doctor. And, 80 percent read no less than six reviews to evaluate a physician fairly.
This makes it important to request genuine reviews frequently from loyal and satisfied patients. After all, reviews effectively improve the reputation of your practice online.
- Recent Reviews
Roughly 52 percent of healthcare consumers want recent reviews, written preferably within the last six months.
So, ensure your staff proactively requests patient reviews. When your patients are pleased with your services, you or your staff can politely ask them to write a review of your practice online. While not all patients will be able to post a review, perhaps due to busy schedules, regular follow-ups can increase the number of reviews, improving your ratings.
- Losing Patients and Prospects to the Competition
68 percent of patients select one physician over the other based on reviews. With that many prospects hanging in the balance, it only makes sense to encourage positive reviews by providing an amazing first impression, including delivering unmatched services.
- Addressing Negative Comments
A survey by Patientpop revealed that patients preferred when their care providers responded directly to negative online reviews. This can double the rate of satisfaction while lowering the dissatisfaction rate by up to 59 percent.
You need to effectively manage feedback given by your patients, which is key to driving patient acquisition. Staying on top of negative reviews influences whether new patients choose your practice or opt to schedule appointments with another practice that has more positive reviews.
- Your Bottom Line
About 2/3 of consumers would rather wait to schedule an appointment with a provider with better online reviews. Further, Millennials will pay extra for a doctor with rave reviews online. This means that reviews affect your bottom line.
Therefore, you should consider working with marketing companies like Glacial Multimedia, Miller Public Relations, and Eyemax to build a strategy for improving legitimate reviews.
- Doctor Sites
People are more likely to use authoritative sites like health insurance websites and Google to search for doctors online. As such, it’s crucial to ensure your medical practice is listed on the most popular review sites so that patients can find you easily.
This begins by claiming profiles on top-rated doctor review sites like Yelp, HealthGrades, WebMD, Vitals, RateMDs, and Google My Business. And this is the weight these trusted review sites hold: A 2017 research by the Journal of General Internal Medicine revealed that 57 percent of patients trust sites like Healthgrades and Yelp.
Generate more positive online patient reviews using medical reputation management & review generation software MDidentity, and manage the leads those new great reviews will bring in with your MDprospects medical CRM & lead management software.
When all is said and done, your online reputation reflects your patients’ experiences at your practice and who you are as a healthcare provider. Having a lot of positive reviews strengthens and protects your reputation while establishing an online presence that converts leads into loyal patients. Combined, patient reviews with MDidentity and MDprospects’s top-of-the-line lead management software are powerful tools that can be leveraged to drive real long-term growth for your practice. To find out how MDidentity can benefit your practice, please book a demo.
