How to Get More Patient Referrals with Healthgrades Reviews

What is Healthgrades, and how does it work?

Healthgrades houses profiles of nearly every healthcare professional in the U.S., according to their website. The profiles are based on professionals who have a listing with the National Provider Identifier Registry — a free directory that standardizes how professionals identify themselves in the industry. If a listing exists there, a free profile for that doctor should also exist on Healthgrades. 

Doctors and healthcare professionals can then claim their free profile and add more details to help manage their reputation on the platform and ensure accurate, helpful information is available about them. 

Hospitals and medical groups can also register on the site and utilize marketing and advertising features to promote their doctors, whose profiles are then marked as sponsored profiles on the platform. 

Real patients share their experiences with a doctor by leaving reviews on the platform. Combined with Healthgrades’ proprietary methodology for rating doctors, reviews provide valuable, firsthand accounts that help people who are researching make an informed decision.

Setting the right expectations

Most doctor directories and healthcare review platforms — such as WebMD and Zocdoc — focus on doctor profiles, rankings, and reviews, providing patients with objective data derived from user-generated content. This is all good. But Healthgrades takes it further.

Healthgrades evaluates risk-adjusted mortality and complication rates at approximately 4,500 hospitals each year. The platform then uses this hospital data to rank the doctors who practice there — in addition to other factors such as the doctor’s level of experience, patient satisfaction, and any medical sanctions they may have, like a suspended license. 

Though there is significant criticism within the industry about Healthgrades’ rating methodology, it nevertheless resonates strongly with patients — and as a result, they trust Healthgrades more. 

So, in addition to patients having the helpful tools and information they need to find the right healthcare provider, they’ve also been conditioned by Healthgrades to expect a certain standard of quality on the platform and to look for precise details. These are standards and details that other review platforms and sites like Google, Yelp, and Facebook don’t necessarily provide to consumers who are searching for care. 

Bottom line: Patient trust is baked into Healthgrades. And if you want to capitalize on that established trust and appeal to potential patients, it’s important to take control of your profile and manage your brand well.

The business goals you can achieve using Healthgrades

As a mature platform, Healthgrades offers more to doctors and medical groups than its competitors. Here are some of the goals healthcare professionals can accomplish on the platform:

1. Superior branding: Most doctors aren’t branding experts — and, for that matter, neither are many marketers. It’s easy to think that your “brand” is your stated mission or promise, your products or services, a story you tell about yourself, or even your logo — but it’s none of those things. Branding is your reputation. It’s the gut feeling patients have about you or your clinic, hospital, or facility. Healthgrades is an effective way to sculpt and maintain a superior brand.
2. More appointment bookings: With your completed profile that conveys the right authority, credibility, trust, and performance markers, you can get more scheduled appointments from patients. According to Healthgrades, patients are twice as likely to book an appointment on the platform when your profile is complete.
3. Five-star reviews: Providing great care matters — and your Healthgrades profile and reviews help confirm to others that you’re capable of doing so. Five-star reviews attract new patients who will (hopefully) have a good experience and write their own five-star review, keeping the cycle going.
4. Increased traffic: With consistent attention to your profile, you can expect to receive more traffic to your digital and physical locations. You can enable a steady flow of patients who are interested in specific providers or your clinic in general.
5. More referrals: Your completed profile stands out to other physicians as well. Many are on the lookout for highly skilled healthcare professionals in various specialties to whom they can consistently refer patients. 

Though these may seem like standard goals, in reality they’re not. Goal setting on many other platforms often requires a broad or highly specialized approach. For example, some platforms focus primarily on booking appointments (e.g.,  Zocdoc), while other platforms aim to be a large provider of general but useful information (e.g., WebMD). Healthgrades is set up to enable all of these goals together. 

But to get there, you first need to claim your profile, which we’ll discuss next.

How to create and claim your Healthgrades profile

Because Healthgrades claims to have a profile on just about every doctor in the country, there’s a very good chance you’re already listed on the platform. Let’s take a look at how you go about claiming or creating a profile.

1. Go to update.healthgrades.com and click “Find Your Profile.”
2. Enter your location and your name, then click the “Find Your Profile” button at the bottom. If you can’t find your profile, you can either click the “Try our NPI-based search” link below or contact Healthgrades directly.
3. If your profile exists, confirm your identity — whether you’re the provider yourself or a third-party representative.
4. You’ll then be contacted by a Healthgrades representative to verify your profile information. 
5. Once you’re verified, you’ll be able to update your profile with:
   
   • A brief bio or introductory statement
   • Your professional headshot
   • Name, address, and map location of your clinic
   • Your specialties, board certifications, education, and awards
   • Affiliated hospitals you work for

You can also manage reviews left by previous patients by accessing review trends and sentiment analysis and filtering reviews by a variety of criteria.

If you represent a hospital or medical group looking to take advantage of Healthgrades’ marketing, branding, and automation tools — a.k.a. partner solutions — here’s what you can do:

1. Go to b2b.healthgrades.com and click the “Get in Touch” button.
2. Fill out the form with your name, organization, job title, and contact info.
3. Select the solutions you’re interested in, along with your industry, and click “Talk to Us” to complete the form.
4. You’ll then be contacted by a representative of Healthgrades.

Healthgrades rules and regulations

Healthgrades does have some platform policies that are worth reviewing — so you know what to expect as you and the public use the site.  

Though Healthgrades doesn’t provide general standards you must follow for maintaining your doctor profile, you can drill down into the platform’s policies around advertising, cookies and data, editorial and community review guidelines, privacy, and the user agreement to find information that may be relevant to your specific practice.

How to get Healthgrades reviews

Now we can get to the good stuff — patient reviews. There are a couple of important avenues for getting reviews that include quality of the care and experience you provide and your willingness and ability to request reviews. Let’s look at both.

1. Provide a stellar patient experience

In a previous survey about patient sentiment, Healthgrades shared these discoveries: 

• 95% of patient comments on Healthgrades touch on at least one of six themes:
  • Bedside manner: The patient’s comfort with a doctor and their personality, and how the doctor makes the patient feel.
  • Communication: Whether the patient felt a doctor listened to questions and provided clear information.
  • Skill and care quality: A patient’s trust in the provider’s ability to provide effective treatment.
  • Staff: A patient’s interaction with medical office staff, which patients may also interpret as nurses.
  • Visit time: The total time spent at the doctor’s office, including the appointment. For some patients, a shorter visit time is desirable, while others may value a doctor spending significant time with them.
  • Wait time: The time spent at the doctor’s office waiting for an appointment to begin or between segments of an appointment.
• Patients most often mention a doctor’s skill or care quality when writing reviews.
• In negative reviews, patients mention the factors of wait time, visit time, and office staff up to 3X more often than they do in positive reviews.
• Patients often view a doctor’s skill or care quality through the lens of their own personal result or outcome.

As a healthcare professional, when you consistently exceed expectations in at least some — and ideally all — of these six areas, you will find it easier to earn more five-star reviews. You’ll also find that your brand recognition and recall improves among healthcare consumers as a result of your stellar record. 

So, offering quality care, employing awesome staff, and providing an excellent patient experience should be your top priorities if you want more positive Healthgrades reviews and patient referrals. 

2. Request reviews from patients

As you build your review portfolio, you should actively request reviews. We recently compiled some really solid data that illustrates the importance of healthcare providers having a review request strategy and the enormous benefits it can bring. Here are some good tactics to include in your strategy: 

• Educate your staff about why online reviews are so important, and incorporate review requests into your patient processes.
• Make sure the review request comes directly from someone in your office — such as an office manager or administrator.
• If you decide to use a third-party service to request reviews, ensure it’s a reputable one.
• Ask for honest feedback and accept what comes back — even if it’s negative. Never try to press for or incentivize a positive review only. Not only is this unethical, it’s also a violation of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rules.
• Be strategic about when you ask for reviews — timing does matter. Ask the patient as they’re on their way out of the office, or within a few days of the visit, treatment, or procedure so the experience is still fresh in their mind and they’ve had time to see a result. 
• Try out a variety of methods and channels for requesting reviews. Email and SMS are hugely popular and successful methods right now, but you can also request reviews in person, over the phone, with a link on your practice website, or with a QR code on a brochure or postcard. 

While we’re at it, it’s vitally important that you read up on how HIPAA compliance relates to review responses. It’s best practice to respond to patient reviews, but you’ll want to ensure you’re giving HIPAA-compliant review responses so you can avoid disclosing confidential information and violating patient privacy. 

How to use your Healthgrades reviews for marketing and advertising

First things first: If you run your own practice, you have a higher degree of control over how you advertise and market than you do if you’re part of a more extensive healthcare system. Being part of a larger system or medical group means you may lack marketing control but tend to have more available resources for promoting your business. In other words, there are tradeoffs. 

That being said, a good place to start is to leverage your Healthgrades reviews along with other review platforms in a kind of cross-pollination strategy for maximum visibility. Here’s how:

• Create or claim profiles on other doctor review platforms such as Zocdoc, WebMD, Vitals, and any others that are relevant to your practice or specialty.
• Reach out to your repeat patients who wrote a positive review on Healthgrades in the past (six months to one year ago) and see if they might be willing to write a review again.
• If so, ask them to write the review on another platform. Make it super easy for them by providing the link to the review platform of your choice.
• Going forward, send a portion of your new patients to Healthgrades to write reviews and another portion to the other platforms where you have a profile — so you’re consistently getting new reviews in multiple places. 
• However, make sure that if a new patient comes to you via Healthgrades, you ask them to write a review on Healthgrades. Same thing if a patient comes to you via Zocdoc. That way you can minimize confusion about where a new patient should write a review.

Why go to all this trouble? Because having a strong review portfolio and a managed presence on multiple third-party review sites enables you to be far more visible in Google searches. When consumers search for a local healthcare provider, they’ll see wave after wave of five-star reviews of your practice on a variety of sites. Because potential patients see you everywhere, you rise to the top of their mind. As a result, you get an increase in lead generation, conversions, and appointment bookings for your practice. 

Another way you can use your Healthgrades reviews to market your practice is to include a Healthgrades star ratings badge on your website. Potential patients who have landed on your site while doing research can quickly see what your overall Healthgrades rating is and get the confirmation they’re looking for that you’re a quality choice.

Healthgrades is critical to your reputation and referrals

When people choose a doctor, they choose carefully. After all, healthcare can literally be a matter of life and death. While other review platforms focus on profiles, ratings, and reviews, Healthgrades goes the extra mile of factoring in hospital mortality and complication rates — and whether you see this as fair or not, it gives patients an extra boost in trust and confidence when they use the platform.

If you want to secure your online reputation with your target audience and get more patient referrals, you need to claim your Healthgrades profile and fill it with helpful information that shows potential patients why you’re the very best doctor for their needs.

Using Healthgrades to your advantage, you can increase your stream of new patients, get additional referrals from other doctors, and give your practice the promotional tools it needs to thrive.

To learn how GatherUp’s reputation management platform can support your insurance business, request a consultation with one of our reputation experts today.