The Path to Paperless

Protect The Reputation of Your Practice

Negative reviews on social media can keep patients away.

By Peter J. Polack, MD, FACS

Social media is fast becoming a fact of modern life. People are searching on Facebook and using Google maps instead of just using the phone book. Prospective customers look at social media review sites before they decide to patronize a business.

What does this have to do with your medical practice? Whether you like it or not, patients are “reviewing” their physicians, who have little control over what patients are saying about them in the social network.

A local eye doctor has only a dozen reviews on Google, but they are all horrible — not a single positive one.Who is the source of these comments? Were they orchestrated by a competitor? Or, perhaps, by someone with a personal grudge? Now, this doctor isn’t so bad, but a potential new patient would think otherwise and keep looking for another doctor.

Protect Your Reputation

What could a doctor in this situation do? It’s a widely held maxim that a satisfied customer tells a friend but a dissatisfied one tells 10. There are probably many more Web sites disparaging LASIK than sites extolling its benefits. Clearly, in the case of social media, it’s better to be proactive than reactive.

Reputation Monitoring Services

One option is to engage a reputation monitoring service. These services use proprietary algorithms that increase the profile of favorable listings about your practice on search engines and review sites and push unfavorable comments down and away from visitors’ eyes. The idea is that most people rarely read beyond the first page of listings and hopefully only see favorable comments.

These include such products as Reputation.com for Business and eMerit that can be accessed at the Web site MedicalJustice.com.

Provide Better Customer Service

The days of having a terrible bedside manner while relying solely on one’s clinical skills are becoming a distant memory. Patients have become our customers just as they are customers of any other industry — and they can take their business elsewhere.

Ask a practice management consultant to observe all aspects of your practice’s interaction with patients, including phone calls. Or hire “secret shoppers” to call your practice to schedule an appointment and go through the entire patient experience — and then give you frank feedback.

Have a Patient Advocate

We all have had patients who have insisted that the practice dropped the ball when perhaps a simple miscommunication existed. Doctors are often too busy to handle the problem with patience.

Sometimes it’s better to have the practice administrator or a clinical coordinator act as the patient’s advocate and calmly try to right the wrong. We have had new patients tell us they heard about us on a social forum in their local retirement community, where we made a mistake, but were able to correct it to that person’s satisfaction. The fact that we could make this kind of recovery gave us additional credibility with potential patients.

Be Proactive; Don’t Play Defense

Put processes in place that encourage customers to post positive commentary about your practice and your doctors. This can be as easy as giving them written instructions on how to post a glowing review on Yelp. Or helping them to log in to your practice Facebook account on an iPad in your waiting room. OM

Peter J. Polack, MD, FACS, is co-managing partner for Ocala Eye, a multisubspecialty ophthalmology practice located in Ocala, Fla. He is also founder of Emedikon, an online practice management resource for physicians and administrators.