Physician Reputation Management - Key Strategies You Should Implement

In this day and age, everything written online carries substantial weight - especially in the medical industry. Because patients are influenced by your digital footprint (positive or negative), a way to ensure your practice thrives is to start thinking about physician reputation management.

Cultivating a trustworthy online brand and managing online reviews is very challenging. But if you implement the right physician reputation management strategies, you can monitor, harbor, and protect your online reputation with a newfound level of confidence. 

What is Physician Reputation Management?

Reputation management refers to building and managing a positive online reputation. In the medical field, reputation management often includes keeping an eye on what your patients say about you online and addressing the feedback. 

But doesn’t your expertise matter most?

Yes, though it’s just one piece of the puzzle in the modern era. 

Consider this:

Almost 90% of patients evaluate physicians using online reviews. Moreover, over 70% of the patients search for a new physician online. 

To put this in perspective, just a few negative reviews and comments online may cause you to lose patients, despite the fact most of your patient base is happy with your services. So, physician reputation management can make a big difference between financial ruin and a thriving medical practice.

Key Components of a Physician’s Online Reputation

There are various components of your digital reputation, some of which include:

• Reviews and ratings: reviews on platforms such as Google and RateMDs (to name a few) indicate your overall patient satisfaction. 
• Website: patients also expect their doctors to have a professional website that outlines credentials, education, experience, and any certificates.
• Online directories and listings: most people today expect their doctors to have active listings on Google and medical directories such as WebMD.
• Media coverage: articles, interviews, and features in medical publications are a good indication of a physician’s overall reputation.
• Search engine rankings: medical professionals who rank higher on search engine result pages are viewed as more trustworthy and reliable. 

Now that you know what you’re up against, we can talk strategy.

Best Physician Reputation  Management Strategies

While improving your online standing seems overwhelming, you can see positive results by implementing some tried and tested physician reputation management strategies:

1.  Build a Quality Website

A website made in 2009 isn’t going to cut it anymore. Today’s consumers spend more time than ever online and will subconsciously compare your website to your competitors. The design, technical performance, and ease of navigation will be some of the deciding factors when looking for a new physician.

Here are some basics of optimizing your website to attract patients:

• Highlight your expertise
• Share accolades and accomplishments
• Include patient testimonials
• Insist on a user-friendly-design
• Improve your website’s navigation
• Use relevant keywords in your content to boost your ranking
• Incorporate internal links to relevant pages on the website

If any of these aren’t there, your potential patients will quickly become frustrated and simply click off to another site. 

2. Improve Patient Experience

By no means a digital strategy, improving the patient experience in real life will pour over into your online reputation.

Here are some crucial techniques:

• Keep your patients in the loop: inform them about any procedures, treatments, and side effects. This shows transparency, which is something most patients appreciate.
• Be respectful: validate and respect your patients’ experiences, particularly when it comes to any concerns they may have.
• Follow-up promptly: following up with a patient post-treatment will make them feel you care. 
• Solicit feedback: ask them if they have any suggestions about your services. This not only helps improve your overall service but your patients will feel heard, more so if you make improvements according to their input.
  
  

By proactively working on enhancing the patient experience in your practice, you’ll set yourself up for success and minimize the possibility of any negative online feedback.

3. Generate Positive Reviews

We’ve finally arrived at arguably the crucial aspect of physician reputation management - reviews. Encouraging positive feedback allows you to easily boost your online reputation and presence. It’s no secret that Google prioritizes showing listings of doctors who are higher-rated on their platform. 

So, how to inspire patients to leave their feedback?

Try this:

• Ask directly: feel free to request the patient to share their personal experience online after a positive outcome. Let them know that their input can help improve your services and assist others in making the right decision.
• Simplify the process: don’t ask patients to look you up and navigate to your Google review page. Rather, share links to review platforms on your website, email, or social media pages. 
• Display positive reviews: showcasing past positive reviews prominently on your pages can act as social proof, but can also inspire other patients to do the same. 

Considering you’re busy as is, chances are you don’t have enough time to do all this manually. Fortunately, you don’t need to.

With ReviewArm, an online reputation management platform, you can keep track of reviews on different platforms, get alerts when someone posts their feedback, and generate new reviews from a single dashboard. 

Best of all, it can automatically encourage new reviews. How so?

Easy - ReviewArm provides you the ability to send review requests to patients via email or text. Even the happiest patients simply forget to leave a review, so this can help remind them of your services. Plus, the link will take them directly to a page where they can rate you or write their feedback in just a few clicks.

You can sit back and watch the reviews roll in - as simple as that.

4. Address Negative Reviews

Despite your best efforts, some patients won’t be happy and will voice their frustration online. This can be devastating, especially if the review is emotionally driven and mean. However, you can minimize the damage by staying vigilant. 

No, we’re not implying you sit on your computer all day refreshing your Yelp page. ReviewArm will notify you whenever you receive a review. That way, you can avoid ignoring your angry patient (who will likely become more angry if they feel they’re not heard). 

You can then respond: acknowledge their negative experience, apologize, and invite them to resolve the issue offline. You can contact them via phone and try to repair the relationship. Regardless of how you do it, once you open up the lines of communication, you can ask them if they’re willing to remove their feedback. 

Even if they don’t, with ReviewArm’s powerful automatic review request feature, you’ll quickly restore your rating to where it was because you’ll be generating so many new positive reviews. 

Build a Spotless Reputation

By combining these techniques, you can quickly increase your online reputation and reap the rewards of positive sentiments.

Since you’re most likely already using a ton of software to tackle your day-to-day tasks, you know how well they can influence your workflow. The same can apply to physician reputation management platforms such as ReviewArm, which drastically simplify the process and save incredible amounts of time.

You can then use all those time savings to improve your patient journey even further, and before long, your practice will become the talk of the town - we guarantee it!

Get all the help you need for a spotless online reputation - contact us and we’ll discuss your next steps.