Perhaps when one thinks about online reputations, one typically thinks of reviews for restaurants and hotels. Online reviews are common for services like plumbing and roofing work as well. However, do they play a role in healthcare? Doctors and hospitals may be surprised to know that reviews actually play an important role in determining whether a patient will visit that hospital or not. Much like other businesses, the healthcare industry needs to consider a healthcare reputation management in order to ensure that they are pushing their good reviews while making amends for the bad reviews that they receive.
How can healthcare benefit from reputation management? This article will go over the key benefits of having a reputation management team at work for a hospital as well as how they can improve their reputation online.
- Bring In More Patients
Understandably, a patient wants to go somewhere that they know they’ll receive the best care possible. Typically, they have to spend a lot of money in order to receive care. They also want to know about the different specializations that doctors have in the event that they are suffering from an uncommon disease. Other smaller concerns like wait times, the number of female doctors, and how easy the parking system is to maneuver will likely also be considered. These concerns aren’t typically easily found on a hospital’s website. Instead, patients talk to each other on different review sites. It is on those sites where a hospital’s reputation is discussed and even debated. It is those sites that determine whether a new patient will choose that hospital over another. With a reputation management team watching those sites and assisting with questions, hospitals can drive more traffic their way. After all, a patient is far more likely to choose a hospital with multiple positive reviews over those who don’t have the greatest online reputation.
- Include Loyal Doctors
Another way in which a positive online reputation serves a hospital is that it also attracts it to other doctors looking for a hospital to join. A hospital is only as successful as the doctors that they can offer for patients. For a hospital that wants to bring in more patients, they need to focus on bringing credible and specialized doctors who already have a good reputation attached to them. In order to do that, the hospital, itself, needs a good reputation. Doctors are quite aware of their own reputation since they know they need a good one if they want to keep patients coming to visit them. They won’t want to associate with a hospital with a poor reputation.
How To Improve An Online Reputation
Whether the hospital has a poor reputation or hasn’t established an online reputation yet, they should consider the following tips on how to improve their reputation. First, patients should be encouraged to leave their reviews on the treatment and care they received at the hospital. Feedback emails can be sent to patients with a link to the review site that the hospital is primarily focusing on reviews. If the hospital happens to receive reviews that are less than pleasant, then they need to fix the problem. What was the problem that the patient faced? What kind of solutions is available to ensure that this problem doesn’t occur again? It can be easy for an angry patient to tear down the reputation of a hospital. In such cases, swift action should be taken to address the patient’s problem. However, it needs to be handled empathetically.