Harnessing the Power of Online Reputation Management in the Healthcare Industry

If someone were to search for your hospital online, what would they see? The search results may be crucial to your business success and your ability to attract new patients and partners.

In today’s digital age, online reputation management, or ORM, is becoming increasingly important in the healthcare field.

In the past, healthcare facilities and providers relied heavily upon word-of-mouth interactions to generate patient referrals, with shared experiences and recommendations among friends and relatives a key to attracting new patients and business. Earning great word-of-mouth publicity within your community is, of course, still beneficial to hospitals, clinics, and providers, but it is no longer the primary way that most people decide where they want to seek care. Thanks to search engines like Google and healthcare-focused websites that allow patients to rate and review their experiences, people have all the information they need at their fingertips to research the reputations of hospitals and providers without ever having to ask a friend for advice.

Now, instead of seeking a recommendation from a relative or friend about who they think is the best pediatrician in town, or where they’d go for a knee replacement, we look to online reviews for what they have to say. Even though online reviews are usually written by complete strangers, many people find tremendous value in them because the readers put stock in the authentic opinions that online reviews provide. This is also increasingly important when relatives are seeking care for a loved one that lives a great distance away.

Many healthcare providers, however, feel online reviews are out of their control, and so they do not focus much effort or attention on what’s being said online about their business. Frankly speaking, this is not the right mind-set. While pr Monitoring reviews is key in gathering actionable insight into what a hospital or provider has done well and where there are areas of opportunity. This allows us to make informed decisions and be intentional in improvement strategies. Additionally, monitoring provides the capability to measure the success of process changes. This is commonly accomplished by using an online reputation management platform. These types of platforms can be resourceful tools, not just for monitoring reviews and measuring key metrics, but also for responding to reviews from multiple sources, all in one place.

Requesting reviews allows you to grow your census data and create a broader, more representative picture of the care that one can expect to receive. In my experience, patients and customers who had a less than favorable outcome are more likely to share their experience on a review platform than those who had a favorable one. Relying solely on experiences shared by those actively seeking to leave a review is not the best practice. This will typically result in low review volume and sentiment. In contrast, requesting reviews usually results in increased review participation and more positive sentiment, which improves search engine optimization (SEO) and makes it more likely that patients will find you online.  A recent survey by Brightlocal showed that “65% of consumers left reviews in response to requests from a business.”