Ignore e-mail at the practice’s peril

Ophthalmologists need to master this communication tool, otherwise they risk losing patients.

By Ryan Miller

Would it surprise you to learn that most ophthalmology practices failed a digital marketing company’s test for online customer support and HIPAA compliance?

My company, Etna Interactive, conducted a recent study, which showed that the majority of ophthalmology practices might be neglecting e-mail from prospective and existing patients and ignoring their obligations under HIPAA. Is your practice failing to make the grade?

We examined how 50 randomly selected U.S. practices responded to a “mystery shopper” e-mail inquiry. Based on our limited sampling, the findings suggest that many practices could better serve and protect their patients with small adjustments to their websites and office practices.

Be prompt

Ophthalmology practices were sharply divided in their approach to e-mail. While 36% replied to our mystery shopper’s message within a few hours, most (64%) failed to respond at all. Clearly, ignoring e-mail is bad for business, but you might be surprised to learn the optimal response timing.

According to research published by MIT’s Sloan School of Management, you should respond to inquiries in less than five minutes to maximize your chances of connecting with new customers online, and the odds of making the connection drop 100-fold after just 30 minutes.

The MIT study suggests that prospective patients who inquire online expect the level of service typically reserved for phone inquiries. This means that for competitive services, like LASIK, you may need to dedicate additional resources to monitoring digital inquiries (See “E-mail best practices,” above).

More than just e-mail

Digital inquiries include text messages, secure messaging within patient portals, unsecured e-mails and direct messages transmitted to you on third-party platforms like Facebook or Yelp. To capture every opportunity, today’s ophthalmology practice needs to manage multiple communications platforms. But in our study, an alarming number of offices were inconsistent or contradictory in their approach online.

In fact, 30% of our original field had to be tossed out of the study for failing to offer a form or e-mail address on their website. While nearly one in every three practices actively discouraged e-mail from patients and prospects, most of those same practices offered links to their practice’s Facebook page. This is a contradictory approach. While you can choose to hide your e-mail on your own site, Facebook and other social media platforms open you up to both public and private messaging. In at least one instance, we noticed patients posting sensitive personal health information and requests for answers related to their personal care on the practice’s public Facebook page.

A patient or prospect might use a variety of platforms to communicate with a practice online. Once you decide how you will address digital communications, deploy responses consistently and train your team to work across your chosen channels.

Patient privacy

We could all benefit from more HIPAA training. For nearly a decade, practices have faced HIPAA mandates to inform patients of privacy risks and enact reasonable measures to protect patient privacy when communicating online. Still, our study found that an overwhelming majority of ophthalmology practices failed to follow HIPAA best practices on their sites.

HIPAA applies not only to your communications with established patients, but also to those with individuals who might reasonably be expected to become patients. With this in mind, HIPAA best practices suggest that you should at minimum:

• Place prominent links to your HIPAA and online privacy policies on every page of your site.

• Alert patients if your e-mail or forms are transmitted without encryption.

• Require patients to acknowledge (a checkbox is sufficient) terms and conditions of unsecure e-mail on Web forms before transmitting their e-mail.

• Use e-mail signatures to remind patients of privacy risks when you reply.

• Shift the communication to a secure messaging platform, if you maintain one, as soon as possible.

While these are all simple to implement, more than 80% of the practices in our study failed to inform patients of e-mail’s inherent risks or to obtain consent to open an unsecure dialogue.

Time to take a closer look

All of our findings suggest that ophthalmic administrators should take a closer look at how to handle digital communications. (See “Digital communication best practices,” above.)

In today’s competitive market, practices can’t afford to miss opportunities to connect with patients. Those who prioritize prompt, professional and secure communications will inevitably earn patients’ trust, and quite possibly their business. OM

About the Author
	Ryan Miller is the founder and president of, Etna Interactive (www.etnainteractive.com), a medical industry online marketing firm. With more than 15 years of experience serving more than 300 practices worldwide, Ryan is a published author and popular speaker recognized for his expertise in everything from SEO to social media, reputation management to mobile marketing.