Choosing a new doctor can be a daunting experience for many people. Health is important and most of us want to be as sure as possible about a new healthcare provider. That’s why healthcare reputation management and doctor reviews are so critical for healthcare businesses.
When searching online for doctors, people look for practice websites and patient reviews to help them form a clearer picture of the healthcare services, patient experiences, and overall reputation of the doctor or clinic so they can make an informed decision. Fortunately, the number of patients willing to share their experiences online is on the rise — around 45% these days, up from 41% a couple of years ago.
Given people’s willingness to search for and share reviews online, building up a body of quality doctor reviews can help you improve your visibility with your target audience and attract more new patients.
In this article, we’ll share why reviews are so important to online reputation management for doctors, the review sites to focus on, how to ask for and reply to reviews, and how to market them effectively.
Why does healthcare reputation management matter for doctors?
In the past, when someone wanted to research a particular doctor, treatment plan, or procedure, they usually turned to family members or asked around within their networks for advice and recommendations.
But not anymore.
Today, most people (75%) head straight to the internet to look up doctors, dentists, and other medical providers, and consider online reviews to be extremely or very important.
Doctor reviews and online reputation matter so much because they build trust and credibility with your audience and provide key details they need when deciding to choose you over alternative options.
Here’s a further breakdown of why healthcare reputation management and doctor reviews matter:
1. Doctor reviews provide social proof to potential patients
As we’ve seen, many people are comfortable doing their own research and relying on other people’s experiences to help them make a decision. When they see lots of detailed, positive doctor reviews, they get the social proof they’re looking for — such as whether the doctor or practice has a good track record and has earned the approval of other people with similar needs.
It works both ways. If a doctor or practice has fewer reviews or more negative reviews than the competition, this is a kind of social proof as well — warning potential patients away.
2. Doctor reviews supplement patient research
Potential patients use doctor reviews to find out additional information that may be particularly important to them. For example, detailed reviews can help answer questions about:
- The quality of care and communication
- The friendliness of reception staff
- The ease of scheduling appointments
- Hygiene and safety protocols
- Billing, insurance, and other administrative processes
3. Doctor reviews can boost your SERP rankings
Online reputation management for doctors and doctor reviews also come with the SEO benefit of boosting your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Lots of positive reviews, in combination with mentions of the keywords you use to describe your practice and services in the reviews themselves, help search engines like Google when determining rankings.
While not the most important local ranking factor, review signals do help with rankings in the Local Pack, along with Google Business Profile and on-page signals.
Which sites are best for doctor reviews?
Having a presence on a variety of review sites is always good for healthcare reputation management. While some online review sites are more influential than others, it’s worth paying attention to your presence everywhere, as potential patients who choose to dig deeper during their research may compare reviews across multiple sites.
There are three main categories of review sites:
1. Third-party mainstream review sites
Google Business Profile, Facebook, and Yelp are the top third-party sites for online reviews. As the world’s leading search engine, Google is important for online reputation management for doctors, as the reviews that appear on your business profile can garner lots of traffic and attention.
Facebook reviews are also useful since it’s the most popular social media platform. When users share their doctor reviews with friends and followers, it opens up another avenue for attracting new patients and boosting your online reputation.
Yelp is especially helpful for location-specific searches.
2. Industry-specific review sites
Potential patients who want to look beyond mainstream third-party review sites may look at healthcare-specific review sites. These sites are critical to healthcare reputation management as they enable patients to search for highly rated doctors and dentists in their area as well as those who treat specific conditions.
Some of the most popular healthcare-specific review sites are:
- WebMD: Patients can search for doctors based on their location and easily browse by specialty, condition, and procedure.
- Healthgrades: With over 10 million patient ratings, Healthgrades claims to have profiles for every doctor in the U.S. The site makes it easy to read reviews based on location, procedure, and conditions, and also enables patients to schedule an appointment with their chosen doctor.
- Zocdoc: Doctors can easily register their practice on the site and begin to receive reviews and ratings from past and current patients. Patients can browse providers who take their insurance, as well as book appointments on the site.
- Vitals: Vitals claims to be the largest online database of patient reviews, displaying top-rated medical professionals. Patients can browse doctors based on their specialty, city, and insurance plan.
3. The healthcare provider’s website via first-party reviews
Don’t underestimate the value of your own website when it comes to online reputation management for doctors. Patients who are close to making a decision about you may search on various pages of your site to get more information and read testimonials.
To share reviews as testimonials on your site, you can:
- Copy and paste previous patient testimonials directly to your site (with written permission).
- Use tags and a tag widget (if you use GatherUp’s platform) to filter first-party reviews patients leave on your website and third-party reviews patients leave on Google so that the reviews automatically appear on specific pages of your site. Or you can simply set it up so that your top star ratings appear on your homepage.
How to ask for doctor reviews
You may find it hard to find the right time to ask patients for reviews. After all, as well as being a business, your practice has to prioritize patient care above everything else. So asking for a review can feel inappropriate or intrusive at times.
However, when handled well, you’ll find that most satisfied patients are happy to leave a review — which will help you meet your healthcare reputation management objectives.
Here are some tips for asking for reviews:
1. Ask at the end of a successful treatment plan
Asking for a review can be part of the last interaction you have with a patient. If you request a review during a treatment plan, you could inadvertently give the wrong impression and make it seem like you prioritize your own reputation over their care.
Instead, be strategic about your timing and wait until the patient has successfully completed their treatment plan and is fit and healthy again. Once treatment is complete, ask for the review — being respectful of any recovery times. That way the patient’s experience is fresh in their minds.
2. Ask long-term satisfied patients
Regular, long-term, loyal patients are healthcare reputation management gold. That’s because they’ve likely been with you long enough to know specific details about you and your practice and are therefore great candidates for writing quality reviews.
You can send them a quick email or text thanking them for choosing you over the past months or years. You can say something like: “I appreciate your loyalty to [practice name]. If you have a moment, please consider leaving an online review on [site name]” and provide a link they can click on.
3. Leverage automation to remind patients
People are busy and although they may have intended to leave a review when you asked them, it’s all too easy to get sidetracked and forget. And keeping track of who you requested reviews from so you can follow up is also time-consuming.
Cut down on your effort and make it easy for your patients, too, with automated reminders sent via email or text. We recommend waiting at least seven days between your initial review request and your follow-up.
Best practices for doctor reviews
When approaching patients for reviews as part of online reputation management for doctors, it’s important to follow a few best practices:
1. Maintain HIPAA compliance
First and foremost, maintaining HIPAA compliance is critical. HIPAA regulates and protects the privacy of patient and healthcare-related information. Though some patients may include information about themselves or their treatment or condition in their reviews, you may not acknowledge or discuss that information publicly.
That means the reviews you might share to your website, for example, as well as the responses you give to reviews (more about this below) have to be carefully scrutinized — so you don’t accidentally disclose confidential information and violate HIPAA.
2. Respect your patients’ wishes
While it would be great if all your patients left glowing reviews on multiple review sites, some may simply not feel comfortable doing so. They may be concerned about patient confidentiality or prefer to keep their healthcare matters entirely private.
If a patient says they don’t want to leave you a review, always respect their wishes and don’t ask them again. You shouldn’t pursue online reputation management for doctors at the expense of your patients’ comfort.
3. Slowly accumulate reviews
If you’re just starting to gather reviews, it can be tempting to go after as many as you can in as short a timeframe as possible so you can quickly build up your online reputation. But keep in mind that sites like Google might see a sudden influx of reviews as spam.
Slow and steady is better to avoid tripping Google’s spam filters. And if you match the review rate that others in the healthcare space are getting, this helps you appear more authentic to review sites so you can avoid drawing attention for the wrong reasons.
4. Don’t filter out negative feedback
It’s inevitable that any business — healthcare or otherwise — will eventually get some negative feedback, since it’s nearly impossible to please every customer or patient every time. Therefore, dealing with negative feedback is an important part of effective healthcare reputation management.
Don’t fall into the trap of trying to ignore negative reviews — or even attempt to remove them. First off, Google and other sites frown on and even outright prevent it. The better approach is to respond to the negative reviews in a timely and empathetic manner, especially since one in three patients value prompt responses to their questions and concerns.
5. Aim for a mix of reviews
Having a presence on multiple review sites, as we mentioned earlier, is important for maintaining a strong online reputation and bolstering your healthcare reputation management strategy.
But it’s also important to avoid spreading yourself too thin. If time and resources are a concern, it’s best to prioritize the top two to three review sites where your patients are mainly leaving reviews. Overall, try to aim for a mix of third-party, industry-specific, and first-party reviews — such as Google, Healthgrades, and your own practice’s website, for example.
How to reply to doctor reviews
As we noted above, maintaining compliance with HIPAA is critical — so your public review responses require extra care and caution. In your response, you must avoid disclosing any private or identifying information about the patient, their specific doctor, condition, or treatment plan. Failing to comply with HIPAA puts you at risk of fines and penalties, lawsuits, and other serious legal action — and it can derail the work you put into healthcare reputation management.
Bottom line: In the healthcare industry, as opposed to other industries like retail or restaurants, review responses are better served when they’re generic — not detailed or personalized.
Here are some tips for how to reply to different types of feedback:
Replying to positive feedback
Responding to a positive review shows the patient that you appreciate them, and it can have the added effect of inspiring other patients to leave positive reviews too.
In your response, you can:
- Thank the patient for their review
- Keep the rest of your response brief and free from confidential or personal identifying details
- Reiterate how much you value their feedback.
Here’s a simple example:
“Thank you! We take pride in [quality of care, services, etc.] and really appreciate your feedback.”
Replying to negative feedback
No matter how hard you strive to provide quality care and conduct scrupulous healthcare reputation management, all doctors or practices eventually receive a complaint at some point. However, not to worry: Negative reviews can be a good thing — even in healthcare — since they point to improvements you can make to offer a better patient experience and button up your practice as a whole.
The most important thing is how you address the negative feedback. Responding to a negative review shows potential patients that you’re willing to listen, take responsibility for any mistakes, and make necessary changes.
In your response, you can:
- Thank the patient for their feedback
- Let them know you’re unable to directly address the details in the review due to privacy regulations
- Offer to take the conversation offline and provide a way for the patient to contact you, so you can learn more and come up with a resolution to the issue
Here’s a simple example:
“Thank you for this valuable feedback. Due to privacy regulations, I can’t discuss specific details. However, please call [phone number] and ask to speak with our office manager, who will be able to discuss your concerns.”
How can doctors and practices market reviews?
In online reputation management for doctors, even with the constraints of HIPAA, positive reviews are excellent content to use for marketing your practice — such as sharing them to your website or social media.
Before sharing reviews (and your responses) with your audience, again, make sure all confidential information is removed. This is especially important for any feedback that patients may send to you directly instead of publishing on a review site.
For example, let’s say you receive a positive testimonial via email and the patient has shared detailed information about themselves and their health condition in their feedback. You won’t be able to just copy and paste the feedback onto your site or your social media, as it would violate HIPAA rules and could land you in legal hot water — not to mention impact your healthcare reputation management efforts.
Instead, it’s better to take positive reviews that either talk about you as a professional or how happy the patient is with your practice in general and repurpose those as marketing content.
Here are a couple of ways you can do that:
Embed the review badge on your site
Embedding the review badge on your site enables you to display your average star rating and the total number of reviews you or your practice has received. This allows potential patients to get a quick impression of how others rated their experience with you.
Use tags to market different services you offer
Reviews that mention specific services or treatments are great for including on your corresponding web pages.
For example, if you’re a plastic surgeon, you may have several individual web pages detailing each of your services. You can use GatherUp’s tag widget to automatically add positive reviews to the relevant pages that include specific service keywords.
This makes it easier for prospective patients who are researching your services to see all the positive feedback and learn more about past patients’ experiences.
Use online doctor reviews to build trust and enhance healthcare reputation management
Doctor reviews are essential for increasing trust among your potential patients as well as showing appreciation to your existing patient base.
These days, new patients will likely give your name or practice name a quick Google search before deciding whether to contact you. For this reason alone, it makes sense to develop a solid online review strategy.
Dedicating time to improving your review strategy — gathering more reviews from a variety of sites, responding quickly and appropriately to all reviews, and following the other best practices we talked about here — will ultimately help you improve and enhance your practice’s reputation too.
To learn more about GatherUp’s solution for healthcare reputation management and tools for doctor reviews, start your free trial today.
