4 Ways Hospitals And Health Systems Can Attract Prospective Patients Online
By Lindsay Burton, Reputation.com
Consumers increasingly use online resources as their first stop when researching products and services prior to making buying decisions, and this trend has accelerated in healthcare – an industry that has traditionally been highly reliant on word-of-mouth recommendations. To underscore this trend, according to Pew Research, 77 percent of patients seeking healthcare options begin with a search engine.
Hospitals and health systems must focus on building an appealing online presence to attract new patients and grow their businesses. Here are four of the most impactful ways healthcare organizations can achieve that goal:
Build A Comprehensive Online Reviews System
The results of a recent survey of U.S. healthcare consumers by Reputation.com confirmed that patients rely on online reviews as they search for healthcare providers. The survey’s most notable findings included:
- 82 percent of respondents had consulted online reviews to help them evaluate a healthcare provider
- 80 percent of respondents claimed the providers’ ratings and reviews influenced their choice of provider
- More than two-thirds of respondents had selected one provider over another based on those ratings and reviews
- 80 percent of respondents want to read six or more reviews before selecting a provider
Despite these compelling statistics, the majority of healthcare providers have zero reviews on Google, the number one resource consumers use to find a physician.
Beyond the obvious benefit of directly catering to the behaviors of today’s healthcare consumer, hospitals and health systems that effectively manage their online reputation can boost their HCAHPS scores by up to 17 percent. Online reviews help healthcare organizations get immediate feedback and address issues that have been traditionally uncovered in the responses they receive from HCAHPS surveys. HCAHPS survey data is typically collected weeks or months after a patient leaves the hospital.
A comprehensive online reputation management system also enables hospitals and health systems to extract valuable customer feedback and insight from free-form reviews. For example, a hospital may have issues with their appointment management system but not even be aware of the fact, if they’re just analyzing data from internal systems. If they’re also monitoring online reviews, then they can quickly isolate the root cause behind patients voicing frustration online and address the problem. This quick action can improve overall patient satisfaction and reduce revenue loss preventing patients from turning elsewhere for care.
Ensure Online Reviews Are Up-To-Date
Patients don’t just want to see a large volume of reviews - they want to see fresh reviews. More than three-quarters (77 percent) of respondents to the Reputation.com healthcare consumer survey confirmed that an online review needs to be posted within the past year for it to influence their decision to use a hospital or health system.
Responsiveness is also a key consideration: healthcare organizations should respond to reviews as quickly as possible, ideally within 24-hours. Timely and consistent engagement demonstrates that the hospital not only values patient feedback, but that the organization is doing everything within its power to use that feedback to improve patient experience.
Here are two more guidelines for providers to consider when responding to online reviews:
- It’s not critical to respond to every review, but they should aim to respond to all negative reviews and at least 20 percent of neutral and positive reviews
- They should make sure all responses – regardless of whether the review is positive, negative or neutral – respect patient privacy and avoid sharing any protected health information. They should work with their legal team to develop appropriate language for online responses, taking in-depth conversations off-line.
Give Your Business A Human Touch
No matter the industry, customers like to get a sense not just of the service provided, but of the people who will provide that service. For healthcare organizations, leverage the organization’s physicians. Each clinical physician should build an online persona that’s both professional and personable. Avoid using overly clinical terms and medical jargon when describing their background and specialties. Rather, focus on photos, short video interviews and written personal biographies to help patients connect with physicians and envision themselves in that hospital’s care.
Engage With Patients In Real-Time
Finally, hospitals and health systems must engage in an ongoing, real-time, two-way dialogue with their customers online. However, this can be extremely challenging for healthcare organizations with dozens of locations and hundreds of practitioners. Each provider and each clinical location has an online reputation, and many organizations will quickly find they have more online reviews and social touch points than they can manually manage. To tackle this monumental task, healthcare organizations should consider at a minimum using a centralized dashboard tool; and more realistically an online reputation management (ORM) solution. An ORM solution can be used to manage reviews, customer surveys, social media engagement and sentiment analysis to deliver actionable insight across the organization and benchmarked against competitors.
Healthcare organizations stand to make significant gains in attracting prospective patients online if they’re able to adapt their online presence to the behavioral patterns of their patients. The four recommendations discussed in this article will significantly improve healthcare organizations’ ability to bring in new patients, which is increasingly driven by brands’ online reputations.